Maisa in Webland: Detouring UX Destinies

What does a “user-friendly” web really mean when behaviours once seen as marginal - stalking, teasing, ghosting - have become part of how we survive, care, and belong online? How can one thrive without becoming an “Interdisciplinary Unicorn,” the ideal user-citizen fluent in optimization, branding, and constant productivity? And how are we supposed to log off when surveillance and the erosion of privacy have been normalized, while every cool or cringe gesture fuels the platform’s reward system? How do we resist the web’s toxic seductions? Drawing on early cyberfeminist websites and conversations with digital thinkers, media artist and web developer Maisa Imamović undertakes a philosophical, practice-based journey through the internet’s bright surfaces and murky infrastructures. Exploring imperfect uses of perfect software, the preservation of fragile web spaces, tactical content strategies, and experiments in autonomous economies, she seeks ways of thriving without surrendering to optimization. In these subterranean traversals, Imamović imagines a speculative, precarious, poetic Webland where binaries loosen and meaning escapes monetization - raising the question: can a non-extractive internet truly exist?