BuyOrBeware.com: The Mall of the Future

BuyOrBeware.com is an interactive hypertext fiction published in 2001. Exploring the early internet as a mixed space of freedom, surveillance and social control through consumerism, the text follows a flaneur (browser) through a dystopian shopping mall. This work has been widely exhibited at new media festivals and is a frequent part of net-art curricula.

Dear Consumer,
If you too have given up on the MODERN WORLD—the gangs, crime, diseases, mosquitoes, elderly people, unsafe drivers on cellular phones, drug-fiends, rapists, cholesterol, complicated banking problems, traffic, noise, ozone-depletion, and white-gravel driveways—please try this brand-new alternative: THE MALL OF THE FUTURE—climate-controlled, clean, friendly, and guaranteed to normalize any aberrant behavior through constant surveillance and healthy consumer-ism! Simply activate one of the buttons to join us in a better world.