World's most useless websites3/24/2024 ![]() Most tech companies offer the promise of freedom while relentlessly steering you toward actions that benefit their bottom line. Like, everybody.”īy offering nothing packaged as everything, Zombocom reveals just how much the web has constrained our behavior. “I would like to see some of the dominant forces taken down that are in corporate control today. “Basically, there’s only, like, five websites, practically, that people ever go to,” Zblofu told the audience at the ROFLCon panel. “Younger people don’t worry about selling out,” he says.Įven back in 2012, Zblofu seemed to grasp where all this was headed. ![]() Reagle says when he asks his students the meaning of “authenticity” - Generation X’s idée fixe - they typically define it as acting in a way that is consistent with one’s personal brand. “Way back at the start of the internet,” says Reagle, “you used to be ‘flamed’ - or criticized - for trying to advertise. Then came the dotcom bust, custom ringtones, NSA spying, cyberbullying, clickbait, smartphone overuse, 4chan, surveillance capitalism, election tampering, QAnon, meme stocks, pre-installed video-call effects that turn the user’s head into an animated poop emoji, and the 24/7, eyeball-chasing, hair-trigger-moral-outrage-inducing, politically polarizing, democracy-threatening horror show we collectively call “Big Tech.”Īlong the way, the internet’s values shifted, and with it our concepts of what it meant to be true to oneself. Now we’re stuck with all these constrained, proprietary, ad-infested spaces where we’re all being watched and we’re all being rated.” You weren’t worried about one big behemoth tracking you. “I sorely miss the day when people had homepages where they posted content,” says Joseph Reagle, an associate professor of communication studies at Northeastern. The only limit was yourself - and your ability to spot unclosed tags in your HTML markup. But, unlike with Twitter and Facebook, you could design your pages however you liked. Staking a claim in late-20th-century cyberspace required far more effort than signing up for a Twitter or Facebook account does today. We didn’t have to deliberately set aside time for long thoughts.īack then, expressing yourself online meant building a website, either by registering your own domain or by using a service like GeoCities or Angelfire. In the Zombocom era, mindfulness came more naturally. ![]() Going online felt like embarking on a journey: You’d alert other members of your household that you were borrowing the phone lines, launch a browser with a name like “Navigator” or “Explorer,” and merge onto the information superhighway. Zombocom’s vague mysticism belongs to the more innocent turn-of-the-century web, when Google was in beta, websites with spammy names like ”” purchased Super Bowl ads, and Jeff Bezos was scraping by as a low-double-digit billionaire. “There is no opening or closing at Zombocom.” “Zombocom is a portal without a door,” it says. A circa-2002 FAQ about Zombocom, from a defunct website called, is, like Zombocom itself, of no practical use. Searches of newspaper and magazine archives on ProQuest, Google News, and LexisNexis suggest that, like Milan Kundera, Harper Lee, and Queen Elizabeth, Zblofu has never granted an interview. Perhaps his only known public appearance came at the 2012 ROFLCon III, a “biennial extravaganza of deranged internet culture,” held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he spoke on a panel about the ’90s internet, using his online nickname, Zblofu. The site’s creator, Josh Levine, did not respond to an interview request. The origins of Zombocom are shrouded in mystery. ![]() You literally can’t do anything at Zombocom, and that’s precisely how it sets you free. “Anything at all! The only limit is yourself!” “You can do anything at Zombocom!” says the voice. But only now, returning to the site two decades later, do I grasp Zombocom’s deeply existential wisdom. ![]() When I first visited Zombocom, in early 2000, I thought it deftly captured the era’s bland techno-exuberance and self-indulgent animated intros. “The unattainable is unknown at Zombocom!” “The infinite is possible at Zombocom!” says the voice in an accent precisely halfway between Sidney Poitier and Darth Vader. The site does nothing but display a blinking pinwheel accompanied by a deep voice confidently telling you how awesome it is. Zombocom’s superiority lies in its simplicity. The pinnacle of cyberspace, it turns out, was attained in late 1999 with the launch of a website called Zombocom. Some human endeavors peak early before a long decline: commercial airline travel, the Ramones discography, eating a large stack of pancakes. ![]()
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