Internet Phone Book is a directory for a more inspiring web-surfing experience

What if there was a Yellow Pages but for the internet (and it wasn’t only useful as a door stop?) The Internet Phone Book is a new book created by Rotterdam-based internet explorers Elliott Cost and Kristoffer Tjalve, intended to be used as a directory of people who are interested in the “web as a medium and material”. Sometimes, the digital duo call this the “Poetic Web”, referring to the suggestive and open-ended ways that poetry works compared with more straightforward non-fiction. “Elliott and I have been part of this scene for the past five years, and while it feels that more and more people are joining the conversation, it can still be a challenge to find each other, so we made an open call and asked people to submit their websites for a physical directory,” says Kristoffer. As a balm to the growing discord between individuals on the internet, Internet Phone Book offers a chord of communion.

After more than 800 website creators submitted their sites, Kristoffer and Elliott found it hard to not feel optimistic about the internet when interacting with the web in experimental, personal, weird and poetic ways on a daily basis. The aesthetic of the book follows this warmth – a lovely, analogue yellow and a simple typeface that refers back to The Whole Earth Catalog, Mollie Katzen’s cookbooks, classic 90s phone books and train timetables inspired by Nederlandse Spoorwegen and Deutsche Bahn colour schemes.

Designed by Elliott, the book weaves a handmade style that evokes the Utopian Scholastic aesthetic defined by the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, a look and feel of the early internet in the time where most media was still physical. “Elliott designed the book using HTML and CSS, and was sent to the printer using Paged.JS and CTRL+P. Basically, we worked on it on Github as any other website. I think this gives the book a specific feeling of something that is both a website and book, and neither,” shares Kristoffer.

“I believe there is a lot of merit to resurface from the early web: the idea of a distributed network of links where everyone could host and publish websites, and where there was constant experimentation,” says Kristoffer. “These conversations are active in different scenes from the IndieWeb to permacomputing and the Poetic Web. We hope these adjacent conversations can converge in the Internet Phone Book, and find a way for their ideas to reach people outside of their existing core members, because at the core, the internet is not something outside ourselves, it is something we make.”

Kristoffer is hesitant to create a digital version of this book, even if that means it’s a bit more difficult to get a hold of. The duo want to preserve the experience of touching, feeling, holding and exploring something physical. “One reader told us that she had the book in her bag and then her friends started asking her about the book which led to her doing an impromptu talk about the poetic web next to a river. The physical book does things that the affordances of digital doesn’t allow,” says Kristoffer.

Where the physical book can demand space and attention, on a shelf or in a bag, the book can live longer. Hoping to add to the social fabric of in-person communities, libraries, bookshops and other spaces, the duo want to divert algorithms that prey on consumer attitudes, instead creating a directory that leads people down informative paths. Paraphrasing David Graeber, Kristoffer adds that the hidden truth of the internet is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently – here is the kernel of internet revolution that is ready to pop among many others.