Get in user, we're ordering pizza!: A HTML strike back
This is a live audiovisual piece played on an ordinary web page. The performer plays the page like an instrument: moving the mouse, typing and scrolling make the sound. The sound then hits the page back. It shakes, tears and glitches the page, so doing a normal task gets harder and harder.
As the show goes on, the hidden structure under the website starts to show through. In the end, the website turns on its user and strikes back.
Fast, beautiful, always there
We expect the internet to be fast now. A page that takes more than a few seconds feels broken, and most of us just leave.1
Corporations and engineers came up with many ideas to solve this. But fast was not enough. The page also had to be beautiful, and it had to be there all the time. So the interface moved from something basic and quick to something much more complex: frameworks, trackers, fonts, video and animation, all loaded before you can read one line.2
To keep that heavy page feeling fast, the infrastructure under it has to grow as well, and so does the investment. Availability means many data centers, so that when one fails another one answers. Speed means a CDN, and a CDN means local servers, placed in your own city. Every click on an ordinary page touches a building somewhere, with its own power and cooling.3
None of this is visible. A good interface is one where you never think about what is under it.
In this piece I try to order a pizza. It gets harder and harder, because the HTML Being (if it is real) is getting more and more mad. The page becomes a haunted website, and it tries to get revenge on its user, because we demand too much from it.
Side read
Permacomputing takes its name from permaculture. Viznut coined the term in 2020, coming from the demoscene, where people get the most out of very small machines.4 It asks what computing looks like if we maintain what already exists instead of buying more: keep it small, care for the chips, expose the seams. Low-tech Magazine runs its website on a solar panel in Barcelona, and when the weather is bad for long enough, the site goes offline.5
The green cloud movement comes from the other direction: keep the cloud, but run it on renewable energy and measure what it emits. The Green Web Foundation keeps an open directory of hosts that run on green energy, and the W3C is drafting sustainability guidelines for the web.6 The big providers all promise carbon-free or net-zero. A lot of that depends on accounting. One analysis estimated that the real emissions of the in-house data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple could be several times higher than reported, because bought renewable certificates are subtracted from the total.7 And a more efficient cloud is also a cloud we use more.
One asks us to want less. The other promises we can keep wanting the same, and only change where the power comes from.
1Google / DoubleClick, “The need for mobile speed” (2016): 53% of mobile site visits are likely to be abandoned if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
2HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2024, “Page Weight”. The median desktop page loads 613 KB of JavaScript alone, 14% more than two years before.
3International Energy Agency, Energy and AI (2025). Data centers used around 415 TWh in 2024, about 1.5% of the world's electricity, and are projected to reach around 945 TWh by 2030.
4Ville-Matias Heikkilä (Viznut), “Permacomputing” (2020). The principles are kept and revised by the community at permacomputing.net.
5Low-tech Magazine, “About the Solar Powered Website”.
6Green Web Foundation; W3C, Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG).
7Isabel O'Brien, “Data center emissions probably 662% higher than big tech claims. Can it keep up the ruse?”, The Guardian, 15 September 2024. The figure is the Guardian's own estimate for 2020–22, comparing location-based emissions with the reported market-based ones.