Spencer Chang is building physical objects that treat the internet as a living thing. His Alive Internet Theory site frames the web not as infrastructure but as an organism requiring care. From that premise, he has produced a line of internet sculptures and computing shrines, tangible artifacts designed to make people feel a relationship with networked computers rather than just use them.
The interesting work here is not the conclusion but the process. Chang's path from computing-infused objects to physical shrines shows a coherent design philosophy: that play, connection, and creation require objects you can touch. His playhtml project extends this into the browser itself, making web elements behave like shared physical things. The episode with Jerod Santo traces exactly how that thinking developed.
This conversation is worth the full listen because Chang is solving a real problem, not a theoretical one. The internet feels dead to a lot of people. He is building the counter-argument in hardware and code. What comes next from that combination is an open question the episode gets into directly.
[READ ORIGINAL →]