The Internet, Forever

A list of recommendations to prepare for a long winter.

Art credit

Seeing that I published my latest work earlier this month, it’s simple human pattern recognition to say nothing new is coming for a long, long while. My loyal readers, I am sure you are just starved in those months, but fear not! You are in luck. As my longest and mostly dormant obsession - the internet - flares up I took it upon myself to compile a few recommendations that will surely last until my next decision to word-vomit into your inboxes.

As a firm postmodernist, nothing is more delicious than a medium reflecting upon itself. And nothing inspires both existential dread and manic joy as much as when it’s the internet doing it: a massive void gazing at itself without blinking, an ouroboros breathlessly devouring its tail. The following is an assortment of media (both traditional and new) that hopefully captures everything from the Gen Z internet ubiquity to its retro-utopian beginnings. Toodles!

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021)

Starting off strong, this is an excellent film that sinks its teeth into the meat of the weird messy online relationships, both with other people and ourselves. Despite the dozens of Slenderman cash grabs, World’s Fair feels like the only film to truly get online ARGs and the strange reality-bending power they have. It’s also truly a vibes movie - I don’t think even the cinema nerds will be mad if you watch it on your ancient laptop alone in the dark. I’d personally call that the preferred way to experience World’s Fair. Checking out the cut scenes is a must. The movie is great, but those cut moments left me with chills.

What Happens Next by Maximumgraves

What Happens Next is a kinda-underground-but-bound-to-blow-up magnum opus currently in progress by just one guy - just how I like my internet curios! It’s a webcomic with a very chewable MS Paint-esque art style (if he actually draws it in MS Paint then he’s a certified saint) and a story that mixes true crime and internet subculture, and the resulting varying types of brainrot. If you were a very particular kind of tween on Tumblr in 2015,here you might just see yourself murdering someone or being an accessory to murder.

Spree (2020)

If you were Stranger Things obsessed at all I suspect you’re already familiar with this one. Spree holds the honorable title of the only millennial-ass “phone bad” dark comedy I actually found engaging and funny, and that must be worth something. Joe Keery is disgustingly enchanting in his role as rideshare driver Kurt Kunkle (a name as fun to say as it is to type) and the premise drives into absurdity smoothly and without falling off a cliff. It also makes clever use of cinematography techniques previously left to middling-quality YouTubers.

The Hidden Webpage by Jared Roberts

Please don’t click off just because you saw creepypasta.com because this is, in my humble opinion, probably the best work on this list. In lieu of a description (because I believe it’s best to experience this one truly blind) I’ll share my first experience with it. It’s a late summer night and the heat makes the room uninhabitable, let alone a comfortable environment. I’m also not the smartest so I finished an entire can of Monster right before bed. My entire body vibrates. I put a podcast on for some background noise and prepare to drift away, knowing each story in an episode takes at most forty minutes. As the second hour of The Hidden Webpage crawls on, taking away my last bit of hot dry oxygen and conjuring men in bee costumes on the ceiling I’m staring at, I know it: I won’t fall asleep tonight and I’ll remember The Hidden Webpage for a very long time. Highly recommend the NoSleep Podcast rendition of the story.

The Greatest Mafia Film (N)ever Made by Me, bitch

Okay, to be serious I’m moreso recommending the phenomena of Goncharov and Volcano Shake ‘Em Up. But I think I did a decent writeup of them and some self-promo never hurt anybody :)

Kill All Normies by Angela Nagle

Bearing the formidable full title of Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, this surprisingly short and sweet (as sweet as talking about internet fascism can be) book traces the parallel fates of Tumblr and 4chan politics and aesthetics. I even referenced it in one of my older and significantly worse essays, aw. Kill All Normies is a quick field guide to understand how we got here - the land where an OK sign could mean you’re an antisemite and a site widely associated with Doctor Who has a significant impact on Marxist politics.

Very Online edited by James Hudson

Very Online is a pay-what-you-can anthology zine combining even more internet-themed art (it also features an excerpt from What Happens Next and multiple other recommendations from this list, twinsies). I would call it a work of horror but it’s far too diverse and sprawling, like the internet itself, to be pushed into that box. However, it does have the finger on your heightened pulse as a new message pops up, as an unfamiliar picture loads, as the website suddenly crashes. Highly recommend the essay by the viral author Gretchen Felker-Martin.

-+*~Miscellaneous Recommendations~*+-

• Videodrome (1983)

• Why Did We Like Elfen Lied? by hazel

• My Immortal by XXXbloodyrists666XXX and its entire authorship dispute

• A Tumblr Book: Platforms and Cultures by Allison McCracken et al

• Sexygirlmax2019 (also known as “Hey peebrain, you teleport?)
  Additional links: x / x / x

• Escape from Dimes Square by Will Harrison

• My year of grief and cancellation by Liat Kaplan

• the internet has ruined my life

• Into The Omegaverse: How a Fanfic Trope Landed in Federal Court and Addison Cain's lawyer e-mailed me, and it only got worse from there by Lindsay Ellis