A WEBSITE IS
A WORLD
OF ITS OWN
A website is a world.
A website is a world.
A website is a world.
A website is a world.
A website is a world.
A website is breathing.
Whether intentionally architected by humans or a spam site turned festering ground for links and bait, a website (whether intended to be present for such or otherwise) is constructed by man, and will bear space for man.
A website holds origin.
When a website is a reality that came into existence, this reality most hold a true origin. IP addresses, hosts, and domain registrations give us abstruse hints into how they came into being. Often, the websites we use today will come from myth, if the creation story truly unknown.
A website is lawed.
From increasing external legal compliances to the institution of systems of justice, a website bears laws that govern the systems and cultures it fosters. This may take the form of rues for its community, policies, or other systems for conflict-resolution with the space or people within it.
A website contains ecosystems.
If websites foster people and movement, they too must foster the larger environment that enables these interactions to happen. A website architects frameworks and order for how people interact, interface, and move across them; fostering an abundance or dearth of life.
A website is religion.
We foster beliefs, worship creators, and enscribe our own systems of faith and rituals. On the internet, different websites take form as different supremes.
A website contains magic systems.
As its own contained reality, websites naturally contain magic — deemed as any act that does not occur naturally in the real-world. Alternate perceptions of space, time, and instantaneity are core principles to tis magic, though a website may also resist these inherent principles. Web creators create the rules and powersets that define unreality in their domain.
A website is myth.
Internet culture is at the stage where we are creating folklore and histories, every single day. The nature of information transfer makes this preservation even more potent. We remember spaces, memories, people, visual artifacts, and interactions nestled within them — as if myth itself.
A website holds borders.
The way we design websites can intentionally gate and sever people. Borders restrict and regulate movement in the form of accounts, cross-website capability, or in the way we design and architect our APIs for public use. These borders can be real or artificial, segmenting subdomains and domains from one another.
A website bears geography.
Louise Drulhe describes in A Critical Atlas of the Internet how "distance is not relevant". In cyberspace, an URL immediately draws us from one point to another. The role of the browser should not be overlooked when architecting websites that may end up consuming our experience in its entirety.
A website is part of a distributed world.
Personal home pages, specific use sites, websites stored on cloud servers stretched all over the world. Websites exist on a distributed, decentralized internet.
A website exhibits emergence.
When patterns appear from within a website without centralized planning, we call it emergence. In addition to biological and mechanical systems, emergence can also happen in a system.
A website is emergence.
When patterns appear from within a website without centralized planning, we call it emergence. In addition to biological and mechanical systems, emergence can also happen in a system.
A website births language.
New paradigms and forms of communication through HTML elements and other abstractions curate and make the web we breathe and live.
A website is national.
Cultures that breed desire for self-sustenance and sovereignty will be birthed upon a website. Devotion to the point of resistance and potential provocation to other websites is not only possible, but commonplace.
A website is a moldable form.
In a medium designed to be distributed, deployable, and instantaneus — we are all crafting, molding, and shaping the websites we interact with.
A website has gods.
Deities, or figures of varying states of omnipresence and omnipotence preside over the websites we interact with. Tracking technologies, heatmaps, input detection, IP address finders... they all make transparent and known the way we interface with websites to their godly creator.