interactive art · creative development · digitalcomplication.com
This one wasn't a client brief. It was a question I couldn't shake: what does media manipulation look like if you strip away the pretence and make it a toy?
We're surrounded by noise. Algorithmically generated outrage, rotating narratives, emotional amplification dressed up as journalism. The problem is that most people don't see the mechanism. They just feel the effect. The Digital Complication is an attempt to show you the controls while you're pulling the levers.
This started with a simple question: what happens when you stop blaming algorithms and start looking at the humans behind them? Every dark pattern was designed by a person. Every addictive loop was signed off in a meeting. Every engagement metric that prioritises outrage over wellbeing was a deliberate choice made by someone who understood exactly what it would do. The Digital Complication exists because I wanted to make that visible.
An interactive website at digitalcomplication.com. The tagline is: "Every widget works. None of them matter."
The centrepiece is a mixing desk for narratives. Seven faders control the categories of noise that dominate modern media: Division, Fear, Outrage, Clickbait, Propaganda, Conspiracy, and Humanity. You can push Fear to maximum and watch the noise words change accordingly. You can turn Propaganda up and Humanity down. There's a FACTORY SETTINGS button that resets the desk to the defaults. Humanity starts at zero. Division, Fear and Outrage start at fifty.
Around it: a rotating news desk generating noise words in real time. An oscilloscope signal monitor. An eight-channel emotional level analyser with VU meters and peak hold. Draggable knobs. A chumbox of auto-rotating satirical clickbait. A ticker of fake system metrics scrolling along the bottom. Everything responds. Everything is interactive.
Why This Exists is the starting point. It lays out the premise: that algorithms don't have intentions, but the people who build them do. This is the page that explains what the whole project is about and why it matters.
Do You Really Think You're In Control? explores how dark patterns, addictive loops, and engagement-over-wellbeing design choices are made deliberately by people who understand exactly what they're doing.
The Addiction Factory is about social media addiction by design. It references the 2026 Los Angeles court case where Meta and YouTube faced liability for intentionally building platforms that harm young people.
The Targeting Experiment documents what happens when you publish content on Facebook without inviting a single person. The algorithm delivers views anyway. Nobody was invited. Everybody arrived.
The Screening Machine is an AI hiring bias simulator. It shows how algorithmic screening reproduces human discrimination at scale, invisibly and without accountability.
The Guru Machine generates manipulative sales pages on demand. Urgency timers, fake scarcity, transformation promises. It builds the kind of page that sells a £2,000 course to someone who can't afford it.
Inked Lin is a LinkedIn post generator. It produces the kind of breathless, hashtag-laden content that floods the platform daily. Agree?
The Ghost Job Machine generates recruitment messages that look personal but aren't. It highlights how template-driven outreach has replaced genuine engagement in hiring.
Consent Theatre is a cookie banner generator. It builds the kind of consent dialogs that make "reject all" deliberately harder to find than "accept". The illusion of choice, rendered as a toy.
Don't Go! is about exit friction. The deliberately confusing "are you sure?" prompts, the guilt-trip copy, the dark patterns designed to stop you leaving. Try to close it. See what happens.
Every widget works. None of them matter.
Because not everything I build is for a small business in Ramsbottom. I can build a website about upholstery and a website that makes a point about the collapse of shared reality, and I care about both with equal seriousness. The craft is the same. The code is clean, the pages are fast, and the thing does exactly what it's supposed to do.
If you're considering commissioning something unconventional, something that has an idea at its centre rather than just a product or service, I'd like to hear it.
See it live at digitalcomplication.com. Or just get in touch if you have something interesting to build.
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