The shift to mobile web and the new providers/devices common to that realm has been and will continue to be used as an opportunity to terraform cultural consensus on what the web “is,” away from the considerably less restrictive WWW of the 90s and 00s and towards a model of services largely authored and controlled by corporate wealth. The death of net neutrality and the promise of a web in which providers actively value or devalue data and degrade access accordingly is married perfectly to the notion that a “website” is not code accessible through a browser installed on any machine, but a program that must be purchased or accessed through specific, regulated channels. iOS and Android are test environments in which newly constrained modes for interacting with the Internet (or computers themselves) are naturalized, the hope being that a six year old with an iPad will never fully grasp that things could be or ever had been different.
GAME REVIEW: SONIC 3D BLAST 5, SONIC CORP., 199X
“the distortion of a distortion is the truth” - a lot of bootleg games feel like attempts to replicate the superficial appearance of playing a videogame without entirely understanding what’s happening in them. in doing so they emphasise and highlight all the latent strangeness that gets internalised in the quest to collect orbs or whatever. walking slowly through hostile prison worlds, soundtracked by abstract electronic beeps and whistles, successions of images that don’t cohere into anything in particular. the context of their production is significant too: familiar brandname companies replaced by faceless adhoc operations, the implied linear progress in quality / technology / narrative of sequel naming conventions scrambled into a meaningless blob of signifiers, videogames as crafted events replaced by videogames as unstoppable sediment of hostile mass culture, trademarked corporate IPs become strange fetish objects replicated limitlessly to sell units. which of these is the real world?? you have ten minutes.
SONIC: 150 Stars
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