Loved this, it’s silly fun on the surface but there’s something satisfying about reclaiming agency. Those cursors tearing away dark text areas feel symbolic, like pushing back on pages that are overwhelming or tedious.
It’s a playful twist on UI customization, not about automating or filtering content but about physically “eating” it. Makes me rethink how subtle interactions can change our feeling toward the web we spend hours staring at.
Absolutely, I feel like there is a lack of expressivity on the web – sure, I can upvote, comment, block/report or go away, but that's basically it. I can't frown, toss thing off the table, spit, grunt, roll eyes, look away, listen intently, nervously touch my face or fidget with my keys. At least not in any socially significant way. And as we spend so much time online, our expressiveness also kind of gets filtered down to the tools that are available. Not bodily expression but a few very limited gestures. So maybe we can imagine and create new gestures?
My other project was about a similar question - what if our emotional life gets reduced to the emojis provided to us by facebook? This was from 2018 so AI images were very new then :)
https://rybakov.com/blog/zuckerberg_emojis/
And another, more productive approach was to look at gestures available in the physical library of Sitterwerk St.Gallen and translate it to the digital world. This was before tab groups landed in the main browsers (and tbh. the implementation is still not great):
https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/
It’s a playful twist on UI customization, not about automating or filtering content but about physically “eating” it. Makes me rethink how subtle interactions can change our feeling toward the web we spend hours staring at.