What does user-friendly website mean if, on it, online behaviours like stalking, teasing, and ghosting once considered peripheral are now central to survival, care, and belonging? How to thrive without becoming an ‘Interdisciplinary Unicorn’: the states most beloved user-citizen fluent in multiple registers of production, optimisation, and self-branding? How in this beautiful world is one supposed to log off, when surveillance and privacy erosion have been normalised? And how, oh how, could users possibly think of building the alternatives, when cool and cringe online acts, all activate the platforms reward system: the unleashing of emoji-filled praise? How to resist the platforms toxic seduction?

Haunted by screenshots of early cyberfeminist websites and in dialogue with digital sages, web scripts, and business interests, media artist, web developer, and author Maisa Imamovi embarks on a philosophical and practice-based crusade through the internets surface and its shadows. To expose the various ways of thriving online without surrendering to optimisation, the book explores imperfect uses of perfect software, preservation of precarious web infrastructures, tactical content strategies, and experiments with autonomous financial systems all wrapped in educational efforts to sustain criticality amid automation. Through these traversals beneath the scroll, Maisa finds her Webland: speculative, broken, and oftentimes, poetic infrastructure where logic destabilises, binaries dissolve, and meaning evades monetisation. But can a non-extractive internet exist beyond metaphor? Can poetry rewire protocol? Or will her sanctuary be absorbed into the very architectures it resists?

248 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm, softcover, Set Margins (Eindhoven).