Defamilarising the Web

The concept of Hypertext—“text that contains links to other texts”—is foundational to the World Wide Web. The act of linking documents in meaningful ways has transformed nearly every aspect of society. Yet in the last decade the Web has moved in a direction contrary to this vision. Instead of establishing connections between knowledge, we have seen the proliferation of barriers in what is called the rise of “walled gardens” or the “platform web.” Social media platforms actively discourage links that lead users beyond their networks, while artistic, journalistic, and academic outputs are increasingly locked behind paywalls that extract value from authors and audiences alike.

Peering beneath and across these walled gardens, however, reveals networks alive with traffic. Each time we click a link, a vast infrastructure distributed across the world is mobilized to fulfill our request. At the same time, autonomous web crawlers freely hop across links, harvesting content to train large language models. In this paper, I attend to the web from these perspectives, producing unfamiliar cartographies. This is a form of defamiliarization: a strategy of making the familiar strange in order to see it differently. Applied to the Web, defamiliarization opens paths for recovering the connective, contingent, and political dimensions that are obscured by its dominant commercial interfaces.