The internet is suffering from this anemia. The major platforms are slick and optimized, with narrow allowances for expression. It’s the Supermall, with no exits and few alternatives. This wouldn’t be cause for alarm were the internet still a measly network of information containers – but as it happens, we spend so much time online, our culture is the internet is the culture. It’s hard to imagine this sterility hasn’t spread beyond its original frame of conception. Playful software that let people experiment with their own spaces and forms of expression are a precondition to a more enlivening internet. It must begin organically from the many and not dictated by the few
Where I see the lack of play is in consumer software: design tools, social networks, dating apps, messengers. Borrowing from Brian Upton’s The Aesthetics of Play, I’m talking about play that isn’t segregated from ordinary life, “[play that’s] embedded within ordinary life; something that can arise spontaneously even in situations that we wouldn’t think of as inherently playful.”
