Nicklaus Wilcher
A&E Editor
The best dreams aren’t movies. If you’re lucky enough to remember them, I’m willing to bet you weren’t always an inert spectator of strange images bleeding into one another. In the best dreams, you are gifted agency. The same goes for art. The Internet, more than being a medium for social media and videos, is also a repository for interactive experiences that’ll make your browsing a bit more bizarre.
The first place many adventurous internauts start is with Wikipedia’s own list of Unusual Articles. It’s essentially a more thorough version of Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and on it you can find highlights like drop bears, the Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion incident and the Bloop. In a similar vein are creepypasta wikis (my personal favorite is the SCP Foundation), where you can find amateur horror fiction about brainwashing Pokémon music, Russian sleep experiments gone awry and Spongebob episodes where Squidward bleeds from his eyes or some shit.
Listed too are shock sites, many an unfortunate child’s first foray into the grotesque and scatological underbelly of Internet culture. It’s not what advertisers or Silicon Valley venture capitalists would have you believe about what the net offers — like culture in meatspace, the Internet is frequently disgusting and profane because it’s made by human beings, not focus groups. The Internet today in wake of movements like Net Neutrality serves as a battleground of transgressive button-pushing artists against sterility and homogeneity.
Even more interesting are the constructed experiences. Sometimes that distinction isn’t so clear. Humanleather.co.uk puts on airs of being an actual website where human leather products (including shoes to the tune of “Euros [€ ]18,000 onwards, USD $27,000 approx”) are available for purchase by a “small but highly discerning clientele” (if you can’t tell already, I’m into scary bullshit like this. ’Tis the season after all). You can also take your dollars to the more innocuous and much cheaper nothinginthebox.com, where you can purchase literally nothing for only $9.95, rather than “something that uses valuable natural resources, something that provokes envy, class separation and takes up space.”
From there onwards we can get more complex. wwwwwwww.jodi.org and superbad.com are seemingly meaningless mazes of clickable flashing images. Are they puzzles? Is it visual poetry? Why am I still here after two hours?
With some digging you can also find the projects of mad geniuses and cult leaders, like the UFO/Death cult Heaven’s Gate (where you’ll learn how to ascend to the next plane of existence by shedding your fleshly form), Dr. Gene Ray’s Time Cube (where you’ll learn about “the greatest of all human discoveries: Nature’s Harmonic Simultaneous 4 Day Rotating Creation Principle of Cubicism”) or the much more levelheaded Library of Babel.
The Library is based on a short work by Jorge Luis Borges, and compiles an near-infinite set of random text (and thus, any text — from Shakespeare to this very article). It serves as a synecdoche for the Internet as a whole.
As Jill Blackmore Evans says in Lost Images, “much of the Internet is not readable because it consists of trolls, fake news and content which is simply not relevant to you or in a language you understand.” It’s a trade secret that the content in languages you and even no person understands are sometimes the most meaningful.