(ESSAY) The Poetics of Memory Online: Hypnospace Outlaw and Literature on DeviantArt by Ian Macartney

In the semi-discarded archive of old-internets, Ian Macartney explores half-remembered corners of web 1.0. Digging through experimental fiction, video games and GlitchLit in the latest instalment of Digital Dreamland.

Mild spoilers ahead for the 2019 video game “Hypnospace Outlaw”

I grew up in the ‘sunset’ of an old internet. The forums I frequented in the early 2010s were the last of an online tradition thereafter superseded by social media titans – in some ways, it was the last refuge of Web 1.0., an unmoderated wildness; the wildness of dreams. They were spaces both real and not, laced with a surreal delirious quality, in tandem to constant temporal slippage (how hours pass until, oh, you have to do your homework).

Tendershoot understood this dreamlike nature of the early internet while developing Hypnospace Outlaw. In the game you assume the role of a moderator (‘Enforcer’) for a GeoCities-style internet community, wherein you remove work which infringes on copyright, flag users harassing others, delete scam pages – and, along the way, begin to uncover some mysteries.

The way you access this internet is through ‘Sleeptime Networking’,

a relatively new technology that allows people to use computers while they’re sleeping. This is accompanied by wearing a headband that somehow beams images and audio into users’ brains and lets them “dream” their computer usage.

(“WHAT IN THE WORLD IS… Sleeptime Networking?” in Hypnospace Outlaw, 2019)

It’s telling Tendershoot used the apparatus of a dream-monitoring device for their alternative, hypnagogic warp of the late 90s. The online slips away like dream-visions in a bleary morning. You snap out of these rectangles, the geometries of screens, the shape no longer the universe – though, of course, the real dream is in this aporia of an old internet which let you do this in the first place.

So much of Hypnospace Outlaw is reading. Gameplay is the interpretation of texts, which is why it's closer to interactive fiction, than a puzzle game per se (of course, as Nabokov taught us, reading is detective work anyway; it’s a Pale Fire of a game, if Pale Fire was a GeoCities site – tbh it could easily be the name of one). It’s the intimacy of relations, that make this rendition of the early internet so luminous – it moves towards a poetics of character. Webpages suggest, in their subtext, their deferred riddles, where to go next. It moves on the dream logic of how people interacted online back then: messy and naive. By navigating through this online community, of Hypnospace, a diorama of the deep dive is created, the wiki rabbit hole,  the place one gets lost in the illusion text brings. It’s more lateral than any typical sense of ‘levelling up’; gamification has not yet hit this rendition of Web 1.0.  

It’s worth mentioning I was only one year old in 1999, the year Hypnospace Outlaw is set in. So I possess a self-reflexive distance to the game’s own constructed distances. One glances over this virtual space as moderator, not “member”, while I too glance at what is now historical, far-gone. So of course the game is elegiac. Some users in Hypnospace are angry at the powers-that-be, the diegetic developers ‘Merchantsoft’, who have discarded a previous community, called Netsettler, with more curated spaces – an allegory for ‘enshittification’, perhaps.

At the bottom of most user pages in Hypnospace are these little icons:

Coming across them in Hypnospace Outlaw reminded me of how frequent they were on DeviantArt. Despite my parents’ alarm at its name, compounding my time on forums as a teen was active involvement in a very specific slice of this website – the non-fanfiction(!) literature community. Over half a decade I sent, via three accounts (one flagship, @AyeAye12, one ‘experimental’, @palladium-smoothie, and one pastiche of Tumblr-girl aesthetics for haikus, @sea-ebony) about 800 text pieces into this virtual space. With a community veteran I even set up a group for experimental literature called ‘GlitchLit’.

What else do I remember of that DeviantArt, 2012-2017? The willingness to experiment, free-write, then  fling it out rapidly. Firstdraft-ism. Containment — how people would cite other users as inspirations, tags long-grey now, instead of citing any canonical literary figures. The collision of ages, in a utopian non-creepy sense (though there was that, as well – once, a selfie I posted, of me holding a wine glass full of Skittles (it was the era of Rawr XD, what can I say), got received with a “handsome!” comment from some 50 year old Dutch man, with a fire truck for profile picture). Ultimately, it was a playground; the ultra-fast feedback loop allowed me to improve my technical writing skills through digital proficiency. And the visceral excitement I felt, when I got featured on the DeviantArt front page four times! 

I have only kept one piece public, a short story and my first front-page feature, if only because it sparked praise and comments far beyond the scope of my usual literary community. It’s an effective snapshot of my time there, and one I’m proud of. But, inspired by Hypnospace Outlaw I decided to dive into my archive, the wider corpus hidden from public sight, and remind myself what I had poured out into this virtual space.

As I implied earlier, DeviantArt did succumb to enshittification eventually. It shifted to something called ‘Eclipse Mode’ in 2019, years after I had ceased being so fervent on the site. This overhaul made it as sleek and dark-themed as post-Musk Twitter/X. Gone were the strange green tones, the flexibility of HTML… except here, in the archive – that which lurked unconsciously under a platform-capitalist shell.   

They return like re-remembered dreams, those DeviantArt pages. Because of the ephemeral nature of these communities, the way code has broken, I have to rely on snatches of teen memory, comment chains half-empty, floundering below texts that no longer look the way they did, when I first sent them out to an audience. For so many text works have been denigrated in specific formatting tendencies, as desired by DeviantArt’s staff, its wish to standardise. It was an amateur space, but that made it befitting of community, and quirk. Coming across these comment chains is doing the impossible – peering back into the dream, hoping it could be brought back into the waking light of some contemporary screen.

Although the first three quarters of Hypnospace Outlaw take place in late 1999, the last stretch uses your computer’s date and time – the ‘present’, your present. After being a moderator, you have re-joined as part of an archive team, set to scour the same pages you used to survey, to document this long-gone online history. Hypnospace Outlaw knows we look back to the past, in playing; it creates the microcosm of nostalgia so one has the double-effect, of dreaming while waking, observing such drifting consciousnesses from our futural afar.

It's melancholy, to say the least.

Funny as this comment is in content, on rediscovery the loss of this person (who I never knew IRL, but would religiously comment on most of uploads) hit me with an emotional velocity I couldn’t quite comprehend. It was an apt sequel to when, back in my family home, while cleaning out an understairs cupboard, I looked round all my papers – everything from my initial doodles when five, to notes taken at my old office job in 2023 – and broke down weeping.

“No archive without outside”, Derrida writes in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995). Throughout this essay, Derrida dismisses and evades much like the internet – But we do not have time to, But we will speak of this or that later, But that is another matter, etcetera. These are rhetorical hyperlinks, embedded in the lecture-transcript, that would go nowhere in the singular intranet of his own essay. Of course I can google and find myself upon his touchstones, Spectres of Marx et al, the same way in Hypnospace I can search a user’s headset ID to get beyond privacy filters. But as in that game, information is obscured by the very process of typing, of search itself. Search constitutes the meaning – the next clue – and it is always on the brink of being lost.

Later in Archive Fever, Derrida discusses “the coming of a scholar of the future, of a scholar who, in the future and so as to conceive of the future, would dare to speak to the phantom”. In Hypnospace Outlaw, you are this ‘scholar of the future’, chasing the phantom of Hypnospace, the dreamlike spectrality within hazy webpages from decades back. But you’re also a policeperson – you started off as an Enforcer, killing creative expression on the pretence of copyright infringement. Only in archiving do you go outside the law, beyond the scope of Merchantsoft. 

For Derrida, this law-making is the exact function of an archive:

The meaning of "archive," its only meaning, comes to it from the Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded. […] They have the power to interpret the archives. Entrusted to such archons, these documents in effect state the law: they recall the law and call on or impose the law.

As Carolyn Steedman writes, the archive “appears to represent the now of whatever kind of power is being exercised, anywhere, in any place or time”. In other words, Derrida’s titular sickness “is to do with its very establishment, which is the establishment of state power and authority” (“Something She Called a Fever: Michelet, Derrida, and Dust”, 2001). In Hypnospace Outlaw, when you uncover the reality behind a disastrous glitch called the ‘Mindcrash’, in the archive,  this is exemplified – in your remembering, you flip the power balance, revealing the amoral incompetence of Merchantsoft.

But this is a fantasy, a dream, in the form of a very funny video game. When it comes to DeviantArt, not least because of how the formatting has gone, totally warping the adolescent intent of my works, I can only re-read them in the avenues dictated by a large digital corporation. I must, as per the platform’s institutional whim to homogenise; I have no choice, if I am to engage with the page ‘as it is now’. There are the screenshots, Wayback Machine, but these themselves are like air, or vapour; scrawled on Freud’s mystical writing pad, if you will.

So I cling to the dream of the old internet I never truly knew, and thrive off these half-memories – however tangential, however fragile, exactly because they are so fragile. It is here I ‘remember’, whatever that means online, forever wistful in the log-off which comes for us all – precious writing which, from the very second we press Send, has (always-)already begun to fade.

Text: Ian Macartney

Image: Screenshots from Hypnospace Outlaw and DeviantArt

Published: 09/09/2025