Wake Up, Donnie

I rewatched Donnie Darko not long ago. I went through a period of adoring this movie. I was around fifteen when I first watched it. It's darker than I remembered, although maybe that's because I'm now watching it as a parent, so some of the incidents hit differently. It's also funnier than I remembered; I think that's probably what appealed to teenage me (and still appeals to me now), that startling flip between existential dread and silliness.

Sometimes, at lunch break, my friends and I would visit the computer room to use the internet. We'd play games on Miniclip like Bubble Buster, or a weird little game where you had to fire adorably complacent pigs into the air and stack them on top of each other. We'd loyally visit everyone's 'internet stuff'; some friends back in Hastings had a Jackass-style YouTube channel, for example, right in the very fledgling days of the platform, and I used to loyally watch their videos despite them being objectively shit. And we'd visit cool websites.

The Donnie Darko website thrilled me. It appealed to that darkly curious part of me that wants to hunt for answers even if I'm afraid of them. On the surface, it gives you nothing but a slight jumpscare: a furious-looking Jake Gyllenhaal staring directly into the camera (or, as it felt, your very soul), poking at the screen insistently until you click a red dot, at which point Frank flashes up, scaring the absolute life out of teenage me. It then leads onto what would have originally been a countdown to the release of the movie, but has been transformed, since, into days since then: this, depressingly, was 8488 days, 14 hours, 29 minutes, and 19 seconds ago. At least, it was when I last checked.

'Play close attention,' a mysterious voice says, when you click through to level one. 'You could miss something.'

And what follows is a genuinely exciting puzzle. You need to find passwords to progress, which involves investigating police reports, obituaries, and snippets of obscure books about time travel. You can still visit the website now; thanks to the efforts of web developer Rich Holman, it has been revived (and the journey towards this is an interesting read, too). Even now, playing it a staggering twenty-two years later, it still gives me goosebumps. It could have been just a bog-standard website like most movie tie-in sites were back then. Maybe they'd have chucked a few desktop backgrounds in for good measure, and that would have been seen as generous.

Instead, they created this genuine work of digital art that only adds to the lore of the movie. There were others like this - the Blair Witch Project is probably one of the most famous, along with Cloverfield, for which several websites and even MySpace profiles were created - but Donnie Darko was the first one I ever came across.

This is the kind of multi-layered, genre-bending (and even format-crossing) storytelling I cannot get enough of. Like S., or House of Leaves, stories-within-stories that require genuine effort to get the bottom of, stories that you can collaborate with others to solve. It uses the medium to its full potential. It felt cutting-edge in a genuinely creative way. It felt like a rare gem.

Why did it feel like a rare gem, I wonder?

If you read my newsletter you'll know I have hit-and-miss feelings about modern technology. To be (ironically) frank, it's mostly 'miss'. I am wary of becoming that person who thinks everything was better 'back then' just because it happened to be that way during my youth. I think I am that person, sometimes.

There are so many things I love about technology. Mostly, I love that it gives me community. I can talk to my sisters and my best friends all day on WhatsApp. I can send my parents cute videos of the kids. I've made new friends, genuine friends, people I feel I can talk to despite never meeting them in real life. This is the joy of the internet, for me. Connection.

But one of the things I hate about it is how bland everything looks now. My own website included; the only cool-looking thing about it is the logo my friend Daniel made for me. Other than that, it just looks like every other website. Everybody makes their website with Squarespace. Or Substack. Or Ghost. Or the slightly infuriating Wix. What happens is just bland mundanity. The content might be excellent, but it doesn't look like anything. You know? It all blurs into one. There was a time in which web design was an incredibly creative outlet. We even had an art book of cool websites once. What happened? Where did they all go?

And then I realised: the problem isn't the internet. (At least, entirely.) The problem is me.

I, like a lot of other people, have become incredibly lazy. I expect entertainment to be handily dropped into my lap by the algorithm. I haunt my favourite places, and I don't ever step outside of them. Unless someone compiles a bite-sized guide in the form of a listicle or maybe a video essay, I won't ever stretch myself to explore the internet anymore. It feels too vast, too daunting, and too difficult to push past the mundanity.

There are cool websites out there if you look for them. On the site Click the Red Button, which points you in the direction of a random website, I found a ton of quirky little places to visit with things to do: you can drop a coin into a slot, for example, just to get the total coin count up. Or place islands on a blank page while listening to relaxing music.

And then I kept diving. I found MyRetroTVs, a website that functions as a television from a specific era, creating a spookily accurate feeling of flicking through TV channels back when I was a kid.

I found the website The Female Gaze, an experimental art project in which you can take a classic painting of a docile woman and change her pose, the angle, and the lighting to create something powerful. (This is something I've already been writing about, funnily enough.)

And then there are artists and the creative ways they present their work: like James Jean, whose postcard collection I now want to own.

And then I ended up on the comforting and extremely strange Cameron's World, which is a kaleidoscope of colors, gifs, and fonts I haven't seen since the late '90s.

So many interesting places to go. I just needed to get off my arse and look for them.

When you reach the end of the Donnie Darko experience, it just ... ends. 'Time is up, Donnie', it says. And that's that.

I think the time was up for raw internet exploration a long time ago. Somehow, I allowed social media to swallow up my internet time. I lost that sense of discovery and intrigue, the feeling I had when I would load up AOL on our family PC, when I would just search for stuff, hoping to stumble upon something interesting.

I know the Dead Internet Theory is a possibility. And I do believe the internet is going to get dramatically worse over the next ten years or so. It will be much harder to find decent writing, art, and community online, because you'll have to wade through masses of nonsense to find it.

It will also be harder, as people who make stuff on the internet, to get people to trust you: to trust that you're real, that you are who you say you are, and that you're actually creating the things that you say you're creating.

AI only exacerbates a problem that is built into the internet itself; you just don't know who people really are. When I was a kid I used to find random people's websites and latch onto those people, in a way, allowing myself to build an attachment to them. I wouldn't say it was parasocial, necessarily; more of a gentle affection. And of course, I didn't know if those people were real. I just trusted. The whole thing runs on a thin thread of trust; that thread is going to be under some immense strain in the coming years. How will people believe that I am who I say I am? How will they know that I wrote every single word of this myself?

I don't know. I guess they'll just have to trust me.

I like to think that, with the slow and sad collapse of places like Twitter and the many people I know who are turning their backs on Meta, there will be a revival of the old kind of internet. That people will push themselves to look further, that individual websites and forums will have a comeback, and that the creative efforts of web designers, artists, and writers will be given a bigger platform. I, myself, am consciously spending less time on social media; that doesn't mean I want to be entirely offline. I'd love to be able to recapture that feeling of the early internet. The possibilities, you know? The vastness of it. I loved that feeling, as a teenager, of just diving in and finding. Maybe we'll shift back that way, rather than allowing a small handful of platforms to dominate our time and attention. Maybe we'll stop handing power and money to Musk and Zuckerberg, and in that scrolling gap, we'll start to broaden our horizons.

Maybe.

Either way, I've learned my lesson. I've eaten my words. And from now on I'll try to make more of an effort to find, and share, cool websites along with books, games, and music I'm enjoying. If you see any, please send them my way!