Tangled Web
How the Internet Weaponized the Labyrinth
In the late 1990s, when the internet’s popularity had really begun to explode, a joke site appeared online purporting to be the very last page of the internet. This site (and its many later copies) proclaims that you have finally seen everything there is to see of the online world, and encourages you to exit the internet and find something else to occupy your time. “Congratulations!” one such page reads. “You have finally reached the end of the internet! There’s nothing more to see, no more links to visit. You’ve done it all. This is the very last page on the very last server at the very far end of the internet. You should now turn off your computer and go do something useful with the rest of your life.”
The period of rapid internet expansion when these sites began to appear coincided with a time of “Maze-Mania” sweeping the western world. Labyrinths were built in prayer gardens and hospitals as “focused walking” became a popular treatment and spiritual practice. Autumnal mazes in cornfields enjoyed renewed popularity. 1991 was declared “The Year of the Maze” in Great Britain.
Mazes may have enjoyed renewed popularity in the 1990s, but they have held a central role in art and mythology for most of human history. The Cretan myth of Theseus and the Minotaur is perhaps the most famous example. On the island of Crete, King Minos ordered the construction of a labyrinth below his castle to house the “Minotaur,” a monstrous half-human creature, born after Minos’s wife fell in love with a bull. Each year, seven men and seven women were imprisoned in the labyrinth where, unable to find their way out, they soon became food for the beast at the centre. When Theseus volunteered as one of the sacrificial victims, Minos’s daughter Ariadne gave him a spool of golden thread so that he was able to kill the minotaur and find his way back out of the maze to safety.
The OED defines the labyrinth as “a complicated irregular network of passages or paths in which it is difficult to find one’s way.” However, this confusion depends on your perspective. Penelope Reed Dobb has written about the double view of labyrinths: when you are inside a maze, the winding path seems impossibly confusing, but looking down from above, an intricate, perfect order is revealed. The perfect patterns belong to the world of art (maze as product), while the terror and confusion of being inside a labyrinth finds its home in the world of myth (maze as process). Labyrinths have dual functions also: in medieval churches, labyrinth patterns tiled the floors so that the devout could trace paths of meditative prayer and envision a heavenly order; in traditions like that of King Minos, however, labyrinths functioned as prisons, hiding monstrous creatures and shameful secrets at their centre, and preventing those inside from escape. Labyrinths are thus “planned chaos”: intrinisically unstable. They are “evil encompassed by a divinely perfect form,” embodying paradoxes of “order/chaos, imprisonment/liberation, linearity/circularity, clarity/complexity.”
There are many similarities between the internet’s structure and that of mazes and labyrinths. As with mazes, the internet does not naturally occur. It is a constructed space, with pre-laid paths, and for its early architects the secrets and centre were already laid bare. In the early days of net development it was possible to plot the entire network of connected points onto a single diagram. The resulting top-down images began to take on a distinctly maze-like appearance, with planned turning points and distinctive centres.
However, with the explosion of networks and sites in the 1990s, it soon became impossible to fit the entirety of the internet on a single map, and as it was no longer the creation of just one person or group, users and creators alike were plunged into the confusion and blind turnings of the “maze as process.” With the invention of hyperlinks, allowing browsers to click through to new content from an existing page, this vision of burrowing through an endless tunnel or “rabbit hole” was reinforced. Each link you click is a turn in the labyrinth, a further step down the winding path. Links embody the insularity of traditional labyrinths, and the paradoxes and confusion they can cause. They are “less a portal to the outside and more like a hidden passage in a building — a door to the inside, which leads out somewhere else, reinforcing a sense of self-sufficient totality.”
The proliferation of hyperlinks is when our fascination with “finishing” or “mastering” the Internet really took hold. Sites like The End of the Internet sarcastically refuted attempts to view the internet in its entirety. Other webpages and flash games, such as The Red Button Appreciation Page and “Do NOT click here” drew attention to the “maze as process” by creating a dizzying tunnel of ominously titled hyperlinks. These links hint at a monstrous centre drawing ever closer, and the only thing keeping you clicking through the pages, as the messages warn you not to, is your stubborn curiosity to reach the end. A more recent example, the “Neverending Twitter Chain,” gripped social media in 2014 and involved a bizarre series of quote tweets, all hinting at something scandalous or horrifying. The quote tweets continued in a seemingly endless thread, with the hinted secret growing less and less certain the further you clicked through.
You can draw some interesting parallels in the experience of following the Neverending Twitter Chain with the quest of Theseus in the Cretan Labyrinth; tracing a “thread” through countless turnings, unsure what, if anything, will be revealed at the end. When people reached the last tweet in the thread, their jubilant comments notably tended to conflate reaching the end of the chain with reaching the end of twitter or even the internet as a whole. “Finally, I have arrived at the end of the internet” wrote one user. “Is this the end or did we break twitter?” wrote another. A couple of people invoked religious terminology — “Alleluia” “Oh Lord we made it” “Reached the end like a God.” One person was pretty succinct: “You monster ;)”. Having escaped, many users delighted in adding to the chain’s length and complexity by quote-tweeting it themselves, perhaps hoping that by becoming a part of the labyrinths architecture, they would gain a glimpse of its structure as a whole, rather than remaining in trapped in the tunnel –vision.
Our obsession with reaching “the end” or the final page, of winning by peeling back the layers until some grand mystery is solved, suggests that at least on some level we recognise the labyrinth we are passing through, and yearn to view it from a perspective that will reveal its secrets. When we see sites and texts like these, or even when we refer to the internet in its totality as “the Net” or “the Web”, it “offers us the illusion of mastery of the Internet; the global and hugely scaled is represented as a tool, as a simple object. The Internet comes represented as a “landscape before us,” awaiting our instructions.”
The above folk examples of “link traps” have somewhat dubious ethics. Is the eventual anticlimax of the Neverending Twitter Chain a whimsical joke or a monstrous absence? Can we view the thread as a meditative practice, tracing our way through a winding pattern whereby the process itself is its own reward, or is it merely imprisoning us in an arduous and pointless quest? That said, the trickery worked by these joke sites pales in comparison to corporate misdirection online, which I will now discuss.
As the internet grew both in complexity and popularity, companies soon realized that there was big, big money to be made from weaponizing the maze structure of the internet to confuse users out of their cash and personal information. Harry Brignull calls these misdirections “Dark Patterns”: intentionally misleading web design that tricks you into buying or signing up to things that you don’t want. It is both easy and enticing to enter these corporate mazes, but it is often extremely difficult to extricate yourself from their clutches once the choice to enter has been made:
Brignull has mainly focused his research on online retail, since the ethics of exploiting a person’s wallet are pretty clear-cut. However, in recent years we have seen that data is where the real money lies, and we are beginning to get eerie glimpses at what the online labyrinth will look like now that links themselves have become an economic weapon.
Anil Dash has talked about the change that has erupted in the meaning of links: “with the introduction of AdSense and AdWords, Google converted the meaning of links from purely editorial, purely expressive, purely artistic, into something that is economic.” Making your way through the online maze is even more difficult than it used to be, as links are rarely what they seem anymore. What was once a navigational tool has become an online currency: the more people click into your site, the more valuable it will appear to advertisers. Media entities put huge effort into enticing people to click, often with misleading “clickbait” headlines that hint at something far more exciting than what is actually revealed after the jump. Media sites rarely “link out” to other sources anymore, only to pages within their own site, to keep the monetary value of clicks to themselves. Facebook discourages users from linking to other pages by shoving that content far down in their news feed algorithms, and has even deployed pop-up warnings about the dangers of leaving Facebook, straying from the “safe” pathway it has laid out for you.
The data of exactly what an individual clicks on in their journey through the web has attained equal if not higher value in recent years. Now when you click on links, websites share this data with third-party advertisers, and attempting to opt-out of this agreement sets you down a labyrinth of unparalleled complexity.
I followed just one of these “data-privacy” Dark Patterns for the purpose of this essay. When I attempted to access an article on TechCrunch while researching this piece, I was led to an all-too-familiar consent screen, which required me to agree to TechCrunch sharing my browsing data with third-party advertisers, or to “manage my preferences,” before I could view the article. I have included the screenshots of my path through this tangled structure below, and highlighted in red the links I had to click to progress to the next level of the maze.
You’ll notice instantly the deception deliberately being deployed in what should be a simple process of yes or no. In screens 1, 2, and 3, the links I have to click are consistently smaller and less noticeable than the large “OK” or “Done” buttons, which will abandon the process and feed your data to Big Advertising. The language is also confusing, prefaced by lengthy explanations of TechCrunch’s partnerships that don’t give you any guidance on how to opt out. However, things really become nonsensical when you finally reach the area for customizing your preferences:
You reach a page listing TechCrunch’s “partners” (Screen 4). Each of these has a separate link to the company’s Privacy Policy — however, each of these linked sites have their own laborious process for opting out. You may try scrolling all the way to the bottom (Screen 5), but there you will just see the same “Done” button you know to avoid. TechCrunch suggests that these are all “Foundational Partners,” and in order to access the site you have no choice but to agree to their data collection — it’s a dead end in the maze.
To find the partners where you can exercise some preference you need to scroll back up to Screen 4 and click on IAB Partners, leading you to another confusing page (Screen 6) where it’s unclear whether selecting the individual partners will cause you to opt out or opt in to the data collection. If you scroll all the way down to the bottom (Screen 7), you can click out into three separate third party sites to manage preferences. All of these sites are glitchy and difficult to load, and require you to run the opt out function multiple times before you can successfully decline sending your data to all of their partners (Screens 8–11, below). In addition, since you have linked out to separate sites, it’s unclear whether retracing your steps to press “Done” on the TechCrunch consent page will take into account these chosen preferences, or undo them all over again.
Despite reaching this possible ending in the maze, you remain unsure whether you have achieved anything in your quest, and are pretty exhausted to boot. The real kicker is, unless you sign up to TechCrunch to save your preferences, all records of this ordeal will be wiped once you leave the site, and you will need to begin the process again to consume another article.
TechCrunch is of course not the only culprit of these phony exercises in data privacy. They have become basically ubiquitous since the GDPR ruling last year, and since users simply doesn’t have the time or energy to parse each sites’ multiple false turnings and misdirections, they are forced consent blindly to signing their privacy away, so they can read the damn article already. The battle for free movement through the internet is being lost, and more and more we find ourselves trapped in inescapable labyrinthine structures, because the alternative paths is too complex and exhausting to follow.
We should not abandon all hope, however. There are still people attempting to combat the and guide people out of the snares of . As Harry Brignull explains, his work exposing Dark Patterns arms everyday internet users with the knowledge they need not to fall into exploitative traps: “All kinds of con artistry rely on the hustler having knowledge that the victim doesn’t have… as soon as that knowledge is shared then they’ve got no tricks they can pull.” The twitter account @SavedYouAClick made valiant efforts during the peak clickbait years to highlight and frustrate the misdirection of media sites. These thread-proffering Ariadnes of the online realm guide people safely through the turnings of the internet, providing people with a rare chance to view a piece of online labyrinth from above, rather than within. By making yourself aware of the devious patterns, you can shift your perspective on at least a few areas of the internet, and continue fight against getting lost in the maze, one turning at a time.
