Open your laptop! The creatives designing a more inspiring internet

This is for everyone

During the Danny Boyle-directed opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games, two true-to-size prop houses faced each other when suddenly, one lifted into the air to reveal a man sitting at his desk in front of a vintage NeXT computer. He tweeted the phrase “This is for everyone” before those same words fell from the unseeable cloud onto the entire length of the stadium, which appeared in LED lights attached to the audience’s chairs. The adjacent house lit up in cosmic projections, signifying the power and significance of instant messaging and global file sharing. That man was not just any of the millions of “tweeters” at the time, that man was Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, the most influential information system of all time – and his iconic tweet signalled the potential of a new and promising information age.

[In Adam Curtis voice] But what happened to that promise?

I was watching Gangnam Style on my iPhone 4 (exercising my God-given right to irreparably beam what was essentially the first of the modern “brainrot” into my eyes) while the Nasa Curiosity rover landed on Mars, Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner broke the sound barrier and Facebook sold its shares to the public for the first time, reaching a peak market capitalisation of over $104 billion. It was a year full of technological innovation and better yet, the Mayan calendar reset and did not bring forth the end of the world as movies and sensationalist media predicted!

However, unbeknownst to most people, the World Wide Web, the invention that has single-handedly defined the 21st century, was beginning a slow process of mutating into what we know of it today: internet culture wars, accelerated disinformation, artificial intelligence “slop”, an onslaught of bots that would become the “dead internet theory” and mass enshittification – the term that writer Cory Doctorow coined to describe degrading online platforms. 14 years ago, nobody was asking if Sir Tim Berners-Lee regretted creating the World Wide Web. Now it’s the only question people ask him.

Fast forward to our present: artists, designers, inventors, writers, scientists, internet activists, archivists, data hoarders and even pirates (of the digital variety) are fighting to save the internet we once knew and loved. From hand crafted online communities to in-browser videogames, interactive and explorative website creators to e-philosophers who are redefining how we see the virtual world, here are the creatives who are telling you to open your laptops and be part of the online new wave.

The Internet Phone Book

In the Internet Phone Book, created by Rotterdam-based internet enthusiasts Elliott Cost and Kristoffer Tjalve, the internet is for exploring – an idea posited back in 1994 by Internet Explorer creator Thomas Reardon. Although the browser was pretty janky (and almost always immediately replaced with something else), the name is, quite frankly, kind of beautiful in comparison to the corporate coolness of Chrome or Opera. Booting up my parents’ old hunk of computer, I was filled with the heroic sensation that I was about to begin an adventure.

The Internet Phone Book, which features more than 800 websites inside, is a Yellow Pages-inspired directory for users to explore the web in experimental and personal ways, allowing internet explorers to fall down rabbit holes that encourage creativity and adventure. Essentially, it’s a guide to find what you want to see on the internet, creating pathways to creative internet gems. Whereas modern internet culture seems to be dominated by a handful of major social media websites, Elliott and Kristoffer encourage “a diverse, public and experimental internet” through acknowledging the idea that the internet is something we make – and therefore we can always make it differently.

The alternative is the “poetic web”, a term coined by Chia Amisola, an extension of artist and educator Laurel Schwulst’s interest in the “poetic potential of the web”. On her website, Chia describes the concept as “a practice and process towards a place: a web that is more handmade, expressive, and intimate; where site-making is a political, personal, and poetic act. This is a growing collection of projects, tools, and teachings around it.” The poetic web pulses with metaphorical and suggestive potential – much like a poem, it is undefinable, moving through images and metaphors. The internet can be a fluid concept. “I think that spirit lives in the poetic web and the people contributing to it,” says Kristoffer. “Their sites defy the usual logic of the internet. They look a little different – idiosyncratic, sometimes silly, rarely mainstream. They ignore the conventional wisdom of web design, and that’s exactly what makes them interesting.”

Although social media is an integral part of the internet, it isn’t the whole internet. “Social media is to the internet what an apple is to fruit – only one among many. With the Internet Phone Book, we try to show that there are thousands (if not billions) of other internets. It comes in different sizes, languages, and flavours. And if you’re tired of apples, you can always try a lemon, or grow your own lemon-site,” says Kristoffer.

It’s alive!

Is it just a coincidence of geeky humour that in the comments section of the famous scene in the 1931 classic Frankenstein – when the eponymous doctor exclaims “It’s alive, it’s alive!” – most of the comments are about computers, codes, blue screens of death and internet connections? Computers are finicky machines, victim to internal breakages and random combustions – the internet is the same. In celebration of the Internet Archive reaching one trillion archived web pages, the site has partnered with San Francisco interdisciplinary arts and technology non-profit Gray Area to commission a series of original “net.art” works that engage with the vast holdings of the Internet Archive, to explore what it means to “create, preserve, and access culture online”. One of those artists is Spencer Chang, who argues the internet isn’t dead, it’s very much alive – and people are fighting for its survival every day.

The Alive Internet Theory is a “séance with this living internet,” offering a counter-narrative to the widely proliferated “dead internet theory”, which argues that the internet is being overtaken by bots at a rapid rate and that we are witnessing the death of the open internet. What Spencer’s interactive art project suggests is a hopeful alternative: “ The internet will always be filled with real people: looking for each other, answering calls for help and sharing laughs even in the midst of arguing.”

The website mimics the appearance of the Internet Archive’s built-in mechanic of being able to slide back to the past, resurrecting older versions of current websites and visiting others that were taken offline years ago. From 2003 to 2025, every month of every year has its own homepage, where the screen becomes a complete mess of information, all retrievable via the Internet Archive. Choruses of musical ephemera and slews of images clutter the screen, fading away before being replaced with even more obscure elements of the internet. No single experience will be the same – the longer you stay, the more items are processed. On my visit to the interactive site, I saw hordes of data ranging from album covers, illustrations, entire episodes of television (Episode 4361 of New Tang Dynasty, an American-Chinese programming block founded by adherents of the Falun Gong new religious movement, to be exact), furry art, X-rays, maps, logos, livestreams of The City Of Edinburgh Council meetings, recipes, job listings, Tiger Woods PGA Tour ‘06, the pirated entirety of The Mandalorian, randomised slideshows of celebrities, anime, memes, comics – I’d say “you name it”, but you probably couldn’t. That was only 1600 images into the Internet Archive’s one trillion.

It’s living proof that the internet is not just social media, it’s the largest, constantly evolving database in the entire world. It’s a humble reminder that your timeline is not the entirety of current culture. The internet is not so much the semi-zombified patchwork creature from Frankenstein, but an explosively exciting, never-ending collage of global information all there for us to take for inspiration.

The post-naive generation

Mozilla Foundation’s editorial platform Nothing Personal gives readers a look into a promising new landscape of internet behaviours. Severin Matusek, Nick Houde and Paloma Moniz, three parts of Co–matter, a research and strategy studio in Berlin, penned a piece for the emerging publication on something they’re coining as the post-naive generation, a new wave of designers who are disillusioned with the idea of open internets – instead, they’re more interested in creating bespoke software for their direct communities. They think we can create the internet we deserve.

On a structural level, applications like Subvert (an ethical Spotify alternative) show that companies can be “collectively owned by its members rather than by venture capitalists”. The article also credits Metalabel, “which values creator collaborations and split earnings”, Perfectly Imperfect, “which designs its feed around human-created recommendations rather than algorithm-optimised content” and Trust, a Berlin-based online community which “experiments with decentralised governance structures to evolve along its community’s IRL needs”.

The post-naive generation is split into four categories: media, hubs, catalysts and platforms/protocols. It creates a type of map for the internet, but it’s not for navigation, it shows that the post-naive internet exists as a mindset within the endless sea of today’s internet. “It's the Internet you won't see if you just stay on the big platforms,” says the manifesto. “We might have traded idealism for realism, accepting the internet of today for what it is. A mirror rather than a portal. But more than ever, we believe that change can happen through digital infrastructure, that it has the ability to make our values real.”

This is for us

As Brian Eno once stated, everything we find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. He’s right, for better or for worse. But unlike CD distortion, the pixellation of digital video or the naff sound of 8-bit, the internet’s unique defects are unlikely to ever be welcomed again in the future. One may like the sound of tape hiss, but no one likes the sound of a tape that doesn’t play anymore. The internet may sometimes feel like a breeding ground for unpleasantness, but the internet is an infinitely moldable material. If you open your laptops, you will witness changes that are starting in microscopic forms, but continuing to bloom and release creative seeds – from the poetic web to platform cooperatives, alternative social networks, internet-inspired art, music and media scenes, the plethora of new types of internets, interactive and explorative websites, retro-styled chatrooms, books that physicalise virtual worlds, crypto protocols and many, many more where ideas are experimental, collaborative and exciting.

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee tweeted out “this is for everyone”, he was referring to the still youthful open internet. But perhaps what we can do with his hopeful slogan is apply it to our own alternative internets – safe spaces of customisation and creativity, alternative not for the sake of it, but alternative because it’s necessary in order to save this miracle of technology. We can meaningfully exclude venture capitalists, cryptofascists, tech billionaires and megalomanics from ruining it. Perhaps, the new slogan for 2026 is “this is for us”.