The other day, I sat down to interview Zach Mandeville, the creator of coolguy.website. Coolguy.website is Mandeville’s longtime creative repository which he coded himself. The website is made up of different subsections and articles that operate like blog posts, each having a unique aesthetic and vibe. The one that drew me in was “Basic HTML Competency Is the New Punk Folk Explosion!,” one of many featured articles on his website.
Marked by Mandeville’s characteristic frankness, “Basic HTML Competency Is the New Punk Folk Explosion!” discusses the nostalgic internet of his hazy childhood memories. He makes a point to differentiate the internet from social media, terms which have become nearly synonymous, and tries to steer the reader in a new direction. He characterizes the internet as a counterbalance for social media: where social media has turned into a breeding ground for social comparison, algorithms, and rumination, he finds that building your own website can allow for more creativity and self-expression without the watchful eyes on big platforms. In this sense, HTML websites function like zines, a medium which has long been popular due to its simplicity and accessibility to artists, writers, and activists alike, and which also gives creatives an avenue to put their work directly into the world without having to brave the publishing industry.
After reading the article, I had a conversation with Zach about all things social media and the internet.
Interview edited for clarity and content.
Evelyn Logan for the McGill Daily: So I read “Basic HTML Competency Is the New Punk Folk Explosion!” and I realized it was posted in 2016. Is this a project that you started working on back then, or if not, where did the project begin for you?
ZM: Yeah, it started in 2016. I was doing comedy in New York and then working for this startup company, and I was on this trip with a friend and he was bringing up brutalist websites and how he had been getting into them. I was trying to move through this web-flow site so I could have an artist page while going through the beginning of a pretty heavy creative burnout.
So I was feeling fed up with the way that tech was influencing my artistic creation, especially anything that you’re going to try to put out, you’re supposed to put them out in certain formats at a certain rate to develop your brand. And I was trying to go hard into that and then just feeling awful all the time. So I made an extremely simple website as an experiment and loved it to such a heavy degree and it just grew from there. So there’s been so many different stages of that site and it’s gotten far more obsessive or mystical or something. There are times when I get embarrassed by the site and then it just keeps returning good stuff to me, and I get “big picture” thinking.
It is essentially a home, a little digital home on the web. And when it’s entirely your own words, even if the words are just HTML, but it’s entirely language, you know what I mean? It is just your text. Nothing is stopping it from existing forever, which is also a crazy way to think about making stuff where there is no timeline… And so realizing that it’s going to be a site that my grandkids will know me from, you know what I mean? The 80-year-old website — there’s no reason why it wouldn’t be. And with that sort of thing in mind, it just becomes far more of a comforting, familiar thing instead of a work to produce.
MD: Going back to your article, you mentioned how HTML and those websites are going to supersede paper and other kinds of physical media. For me, as a print artist and someone who writes for a newspaper, is super threatening. How deep does that belief go for you?
ZM: I love both. I really love physical things. I get really excited about the magical side, I guess, of the digital stuff, but it’s really easy to get burnt out. I feel like seeing tech as the answer is never actually the case. It’s an illusion. And yeah, there’s something really enrapturing about it that you want it to be the answer to everything. And that’s not true. I guess [the] differences [between] 2016 and now, I was probably more gung ho than I am now. A lot of the site you see is made to exist simultaneously as paper zines. And so I have paper zine versions of a lot of those pages or whatever, and I’m trying to figure out the balance of that.
I think we’re at a really interesting spot in which there’s a notion of oral culture and then there’s some form of writing that gets introduced and your brain shifts over, and you’re now just in a written mode or there’s the distinction of culture in oral traditions versus a written tradition. However, with the digital, we’re in some sort of thing that is media instead of oral or written. And our newer tradition seems to be closer to oral culture to me, which is bizarre. It is all written, but it’s not meant to be archived. It’s coming as a stream all the time and even within the stream, so much of it is how well you can remember or be able to access and recall a thing, but that thing might be a video or a picture or some mix of that. And often the written thing that you’re sharing isn’t even what it represents. It doesn’t make sense out of context.
And that’s true of all things. For example, a book kind of exists as its own object. But if you were to share a meme completely out of context, it wouldn’t make sense. You need to have the context; including the before and after and the thread it came out of and the replies to it, all of that is necessary. And you sort of see that people repeat the same things because you think it’s going to be lost, and so you try to bring it back into the focus or whatever. So there is this bizarre making peace with things being lost, along with this idea that you need to preserve them through repetition of patterns. But then simultaneously, we’re still in a world in which we could archive everything… And so they see people who are desperately trying to do that by saying, I’m going to record every book I’ve ever written or every book I’ve ever read (think of platforms like Goodreads or Letterboxd), and that wasn’t as big of a deal to people in the previous generations… There’s this notion of having to record every possible thing, but we’re so inundated that it’s impossible to actually do that. And so you’re constantly tense about that, if that makes sense.
MD: It almost feels feverish the way that some people want to hang on to not just things that they’ve seen or done, but also a sense of identity. The idea of: this is who I am, this is who I want to be, this is how I want to be perceived, which doesn’t allow for any fluidity or elasticity in their idea of self. When looking at your project, I felt like there is room for evolution. Websites built with HTML can be changed and edited, but on social media where there’s such a big audience and you feel like you’re being perceived by everybody, it’s almost this Panopticon prison kind of illusion where it can cause users to feel like they have to be the image of the person that they’ve created and they can’t deviate from that constructed digital self for fear of harsh judgement.
ZM: Absolutely. Yeah. And then you’re also managing multiple “masks” and accounts — there’s a weird political aspect where it’s just a given that you’re going to have four to five accounts for these different “roles”. For example, a separate account in which you want to “ironically” follow things that if people thought you were following seriously would ruin the image you’ve created of your real identity. So you have your alternate account, and a personal account, and a business account. I’ve seen my nephews and niece do that… Teenagers are already juggling multiple identities. And definitely I think if you were to look back three generations ago, that would not be the case. You are allowed to have your ages. I’ve entered this age, I’ve entered this age, I’ve entered this era. And it’s harder to do that now.
MD: Going back to the idea of youth and what things were like before, what was it like for you growing up when you were a teen? How did you interact and behave with others on the internet?
ZM: So I am 38 now, and the internet did not exist when I was a kid-kid. Until there was a certain moment where it got added to the house or whatever. When I was a teen, I was in the strong “Web 2.0 era” where every band had its own website and each website had its own forum. I remember I was really excited by the web zines and especially this one British music web zine in which I was able to discover British artists that my friends hadn’t heard about. And so you’re learning music recommendations and film recommendations and language built around this interest, but at the same time the structure of the site is influencing the conversation topics in the rooms that you could go to… Unfortunately, now it’s all kind of the same. You have one feed, you follow different people’s accounts, but the structure of the accounts isn’t different.
And then I remember probably the most teenage thing being that we all had Live Journals or Diary Land, and so we were all keeping our own blogs that were read by 13 people because it was your friend group that also doubled as a diary circle and then you would navigate through all of them… And I think one other big aspect of [those platforms] is that everything had an HTML editor in this era…There was self-expression and just full focus on the self.
MD: Exactly. I think that idea of community draws a stark contrast with what we’re seeing on social media. There isn’t that much of an emphasis on social connection, instead it seems like most platforms are geared towards generating monetary growth. How do you feel about that?
ZM: Real bad? I think it’s just extremely weird in a way that we will understand in another generation. I think it’s hurting us in ways that are obvious to us and in ways that won’t be obvious to us. In the same sort of way where we can now objectively look back at the baby boomers and say, because you had this experience, this is why you act that way. That’s probably going to happen with our generation like, oh, yeah, this is what this did to us.
MD: What has working on this project taught you?
ZM: HTML. [laughs] Yeah, to be honest, I started out just making the little webpage and then that got me super into the structure of the text and CSS. And then I met a friend who taught me how to access a server and push my stuff up. And now 10 years later, I still work with her through these weird roundabout things. So the site, that little bit of HTML, taught me how to manage a server, how to manage domain names, how to do CSS, and all that sort of stuff which led to incredible things. I live in New Zealand now, and it introduced me to friends in New Zealand and helped me get to New Zealand.
[The website] is like this charmed object that is also still my home. It’s a room I visit. It’s not a blog in which I’m producing stuff. It’s a space I inhabit for a while that will develop furniture that I am fond of, and every now and then move around or whatever, but that continually brings new knowledge and opportunities.