The End

In Anticipation of the End of the World Wide Web

"What's the point?", you ask. Good question. I was listening to Michael Joyce talk about the Web and hypertext (hyper-text if you were at Vassar in the 60's) in a lecture on November 11, 1996, and he was talking about how the web creates frames, but has no possibility of an end in the manner of fiction and even hypertext fiction. And then it hit, the idea - create the absolute canonical End of the World Wide Web, the only must-have link for each and every web page. Picture this: A long evening of web surfing, the "Go" list meandering through the hours, the eyes burning, and you just have to stop. In the old WWW paradigm, the only solution was quitting. I won't go into the various meanings or challenges of quitting (leave that to the smokers and philosophers), but I can tell you it just doesn't work. The solution - to provide the web designers and surfers a simple, easy, platform independent, way to walk away from it all, and this, the suburb between the urban sprawl and the vast nothingness beyond. It is here, finally, the border, an Ending, the End of the World Wide Web.

About The Author: The author has been surfing the web for several hours, and is only now realizing the challenge of closure and the responsibility, nay, the inevitibility, of every reader to write. What people seem to have a tough time grasping is that authorship and authority make this the end. It is my saying so as a writer and your accepting it as a reader which makes the web linear and the page after this its finale. You can accept and accentuate this by linking every page to this one, using the authority of the link, the most misused tool on the Web, to subvert the trend toward corporate-ness and away from the hypertextuality which the web promotes. Thanks are offered to J. Derrida, J. Lacan, R. Barthes, G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Umberto Eco, whom Michael Joyce quoted, speaking of Joyce and Joyce, and of course Michael Joyce, who gave the talk which inspired.