A bright yellow neon sign written "Fresh freeware" in a dark blue environment.

Disclaimer: this is not a critique, review or any sort of analysis. It's a personal experience I'm sharing.

It took me almost a month, but finally I sat down and wrote some thoughts about individualism in the dead-internet age, by Nathalie Lawhead.

"This is an interactive-essay-meets-walking-sim about technocapitalism and the things we lost along the way. Follow coins under the electric mist of a clouded starry sky. Discover hyper-links. Listen to the words both inside and outside your head. Seal your fate before the productivity machine. Together we can defeat the machine. Features include: Pedantic views on tech feudalism with nice shader work, and good reflection captures. Overly critical views on capitalism with lumen and nanite enabled."

One of the first things I do on any game (or "interactive game-like thing") is to do the opposite of what's expected. That's the QA on me taking control and it's not something I do to mock the game, find bugs to complain, or judge the quality of the piece.

It's about agency, discovery and fruition.

By ignoring the path Nathalie crafted, I built my own experiences with the essay, walking away from the bright, enclosed scenario, full of hyperlinks, narration and history. I found myself in a blue dark endless void, contemplating a tall decadent abandoned (with no colliders) building next to this shiny, theme park-ish space.

Although the essay is straightfoward and Nathalie themself has not much do say about it, I had some thoughts and my own probably incorrect interpretation of some elements, but I would be lampposting if I started writing about it, so let's change the subject.

A tall dark building in a dark background. All colors in the image are different dessaturated tones of blue. The building is cut out by the framing, since the player is standing close to it.
freedom or loneliness?

Nathalie claims that this was meant to be preformed1 in a live setting but it's not a good fit. I can see why, and you should see for yourself.

If you haven't interacted with the essay, please do. Stop reading, click here to open the essay's page, and play listen to interact with it.

Have you finished the essay?
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Good.

There's really not much to say. The internet (or the world wide web) we used to know does not exist anymore. It won't come back, the corporations destroyed it, there's no way to rebuilt it as it was, and we should not grasp on it through the lens of simple nostalgia.

A 3D scenario of an office with tall windows and a brick wall. The room is well lit by the natural light coming from the windows. There's an UI element in front of it, displaying an pixelated icon of a bomb and the sentence “it's a trap”

In the age of social media, individuality is a lie. Your profile is not yours, your "content" is not yours, and the general public mostly do not care about you, unless you're a "content creator" with some dandy user engagement.

In the age of social media, individuality can resist. Through community, through collaboration, through sharing.

Individuals should reclaim their online spaces. There are tools available, there are knowledge available. Instead of complicating things, making the internet even more corporate, complex and commercial, there are people creating simple ways for non-tech individuals be able to express themselves in their own space. By their means and rules.

Red background and white font with black outline. The text reads: Early websites were just as individualistic as early software. There was a novelty to picking your very own domain name, and hosting whatever you wanted on it. People had websites for their pets. Joke websites. Special interest websites. Websites became a form of artistic expression. It was all no new and liberating. You could find your voice and exist on your own terms. You needed no one to do that. Just your own technical resolve.

There's a movement of not using social media anymore and use this time to be offline. Read a book, watch a movie, take a walk, visit friends. The issue for me is that when people decides not using social media, they actually mean "not being on the internet". "The Internet" means Facebook, Twitter/X, BlueSky, Reddit, TikTok, Whatsapp (if you're brazilian, the entire internet is basically this messaging app).

I hope that we can rebuild some spaces around the edges of this Internet. I hope we can bring back the people that are leaving. Rebuild in a new way, on our new terms, collectively as individuals. Let's leave the old internet behind, learn with it, and occupy the empty space corporations cannot invade.

An arena-like space made of computer screens, monitors and other computer elements, displaying bright colors and reflecting on a blue dark environment.
welcome to the machine

1. My personal preference is to quote exactly how the author wrote on their site. I assume that preformed was meant to be performed.