Things to do and click and click and click
Adalya Nash Hussein • 7 October 2022
I’m mostly sick of the internet, or of the spaces on the internet I find myself in – clean shades of blue and sans-serif minimalism. At times, it inspires a kind of disgust that feels reminiscent of how my friends’ parents would talk about large American stores. Sometimes the sickness is bodily – I’m not sick of it, I’m sick by it.
The internet used to be my favourite place. Meeting friends on weird web forums where we would RP as OCs from books we hadn’t actually read. Watching YouTubers who felt like my friend, to the point that anybody else who I found out watched them felt like a friend of a friend. The internet was community, a kind of utopia. A lot of the spaces I loved fell apart badly – replicated the real-life toxic power structures I thought I could escape. I don’t really trust these sites anymore, but they feel impossible to leave.
My cousin gets her first laptop for school and over FaceTime she shows me a PowerPoint she’s made for her friends themed around bananas – all images and videos and songs and websites she’s found. She explains her font and colour choices, her slide transitions, how she gathered her materials. I tell her about the newsletters I used to make with a friend, show her the images we photoshopped of ourselves riding various magical creatures. Later, I revisit our old DeviantArt pages, our old Tumblrs, our old emails.
I’m trying to think of the internet as a medium rather than a place. Something to play with rather than to exist within. Something that I can put down when I’m done. As a writer, reader and editor, finding a sense of playfulness, oddness, tangibility that disturbs the corporate sleekness is what I still find energising, what makes me want to stay.
Writing
I come back to this piece all the time. There’s an aliveness to the rhythm of reading it that I really love – how it traces thought processes, displays uncertainty and pulls off those weird half-jokes that usually only work when spoken aloud.
Young Spells
I first encountered this piece when Webb read it at NYWF in 2017, and it blew me away. The way that it combines a certain kind of nostalgic lost-internet aesthetic with a kind of nostalgic choose-your-own-adventure/RPG story structure, with the nostalgia and semi-bittersweet memories of fraught, queer childhood friendships is revelatory.
Intimate Machines
I love the weird vulnerability and intimacy this piece creates, a sense of being in somebody else’s head, on somebody else’s computer.
I AM ASKING HOW YOU FEEL AND YOU ARE TELLING ME
I am always excited by how ekphrasis can inspire more formally experimental work, like how the act of engaging with unfamiliar mediums inspires us to play more with our own. Lindsay’s poem is effective on the page, but it reaches another level when you hear her read it over the sound and videoscape she’s created.
room with a poo
I don’t know if there’s anything I can say that describes this incredible poem other than CW: poo.
The Sameness of Internet Culture
I love how Tan describes the internet as a place, or non-place – its physical qualities or lack thereof.
By the Guest Editor: What I'm Reading
This edition of The Circular was guest-edited by Adalya Nash Hussein. To close, we'd like to share this piece she wrote for Meanjin on a lifetime of being a book person, how her relationship with books has shifted over the years, and the performative aspects of reading.