In early May, I needed to change a pace from my usual holes on YouTube bunnies, after being quarantined for a few of those months. My discovery of Internet Temple almost felt to me like finding a good bar or music hall; instead of content being served by the algorithm of a video platform, I had to know one, get a tip and enter a whole URL.
The Temple made a blunt entry on my browser tab with little more than a concise YouTube embedding and a chat box without disk function. And then it got weird.
I watched an amazing musical performance drenched in autotune (the laughs between songs were also autotuned). The singer wore snowman printboxers, an oversized sweater with abstract humanoid images, and a hat reading “WWW DOT COM MY ASS.” He danced with three decorated sheep in his hands, while behind him a green screen was flooded with images chosen by audience members. They had selected images of Shrek and Unicode shrimp emojis.
All this, I would come to learn, was not as stupid as it did. After all, the owners of Internet Temple are investing in decimating the concept of Web 2.0, and they have embarked on three separate, intriguing projects.
Strange about the cheap
Performer Clayton Collins and box office maker Toby Alden (she / she) are a freak race, creating idiosyncratic websites in the spirit of a bygone internet. Collins, who sometimes goes by “Clayton Online,” has a day job of maintaining software that manages bus schedules. Alden is a full-time game developer working on an indie video game. The Portland duo’s extracurricular creations are essential alternatives to social media, and they are made for next to no money.
The first of these, Internet Temple, has a volume background collage of Japanese sprites of the late 90s. The Temple features live music, DJ sets (some proudly streamed with abysmal quality via Google Hangouts), and poetry readings. The design, with one front-and-center stage, is antithetical to Twitch.
“When you stream on Twitch, you compete with everyone else by design,” Alden says. They point to the constant nudging by said website to jump to other streams or view ads, driven in part by an increasing reliance on the recommendation algorithm.
“They make you all feel bad”
Collins and Alden do not identify with a particular movement, but they are aware that other projects like theirs are flourishing in the corners of the internet, both through small cliques and lone wolf programmers. Although DIY Internet culture has existed since the days of BBSes, its modern versions stand in contrast to major social media companies that are accused of selling data, avoiding taxes and allowing false information – mostly by Congress in a hearing of 29 July.
“You went online before and entered the URLs of your favorite sites to see if hardcoregaming101.net had been updated,” says Alden. “Now most are five or six pages: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Insta, Amazon, and so on.”
“You don’t even have to say, ‘And so on,'” Collins interjects. ‘That’s it. That’s them. ‘
“And they all make you feel bad.”
The temple was written in Node.js over the course of three days in 2016. It recently began to sidestep YouTube Live (the kind of stream-and-chat system you might expect from a site like this) by coding borrowed from Collins’ Saladbowl platform, where he hosts and streams videos directly from his computer to support copyright. This service is, according to Collins, a struggle against the “business movement to make art privately owned.” He uses it to send out his personal .MP4 video collection to friends, but the bigger goal is a DIY streaming tool for the masses.