To continue with the urbanist metaphor, today’s web has been gentrified, commodified, and colonized. Those earlier spaces of intimacy and exploration are now few and far between, replaced by homogeneous surfaces and vowelless trademarks. If artists have a role to play, perhaps it’s to put a little friction back into this seamless dystopia in hopes of a more intimate, communal, and thoughtful web.

Part of this desire for exploration and friction revolves around an ideal of tool-making. If the web is a built environment increasingly designed and constructed by corporations, tool-making offers users a way to regain some of their lost agency. Short of dismantling the system entirely, tools can also reveal the ideological structures beneath the web’s smooth, commercial surfaces.