Maisa in Webland

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 Imamović embarks on a philosophical and practice-based crusade through the internet’s surface and its shadows. To expose the various ways of thriving online without surrendering to optimization, 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 destabilizes, binaries dissolve, and meaning evades monetization. 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?

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"In Maisa in Webland, Maisa Imamovic evokes the multidimensional, spontaneous human elements of the early web, using interviews, case studies, critical theory and fiction as her organic materials. She peeks behind the screen and through time to trace the subtle erosion of the web’s early utopian ideals to its cold and extractive present. Imamovic bravely wades through the swampy digital muck that mediates our everyday reality, examining its invisible psychic scaffolding with academic rigor, and a big dose of humor and heart. Was it an inevitable entropy, or an aberration? How and when did we get so off-course?
Can we return? Do we want to? In Maisa’s Webland, we might very well be doomed, and maybe that’s a good thing. When the center of this tangled web no longer holds, something new can take shape.”
- Nada Alic, author of Bad Thoughts

"This book is a guide for logging on without giving in. Embracing the internet as a form of thought, the text factures and shimmers, resisting being under control.”
- Lauren Lee McCarthy, artist and creator of p5.js

“Against the idea that the user condition is a flattening one, Maisa Imamovic shows that we are fully human precisely when we obsessively refresh our profile page, when we contemplate an unending progress bar, when we rage-exit the chat. With this book, Maisa inaugurates a new literary genre: the interface confessional.”
- Silvio Lorusso, author of What Design Can’t Do: Essays on Design and Disillusion

“When communication stalls, and messages go haywire, take it easy and go this personal journey through the land of visual internet research. Wayward web design thinker Maisa Imamovic proposes to turn the slope upside down. She’s teasing us to unfollow social media while taking us from one dissident artist to the next. Reprogram your phone and negate all platforms is her happy devise. Let’s get things moving. Join the renaissance movement and let the stubborn tech shine once more!”
- Geert Lovink, European internet critic