Clear your mind of questions

Today: Miles Klee, author of the novel Ivyland and culture writer at Rolling Stone.

Issue No. 145

11 Things About Zombo.com
Miles Klee

11 Things About Zombo.com

by Miles Klee

This story is part of The Lost Internet, a month-long series in which the members of Flaming Hydra revisit internet marvels of the past. 

1) Zombo.com actually still exists. I had thought it lost to the afterlife because for a few days my browser wouldn’t load the site, and other fans had reported it gone. But then, on a hunch, I tried again—and there it was. Fitting that a purgatorial web page would flit in and out of digital limbo, both existing and not. 

2) Which nonetheless means that someone is paying, just a little bit, to keep it up.

3) By “purgatorial” I do not mean “punitive,” unless you have no patience for jokes that deliberately waste your time. 

Zombo.com, established in 1999, is presented as the animated landing page (originally rendered with Flash, itself a vanished entity, now rendered in HTML5) for a domain that serves no discernible purpose. Instead, you are greeted by a preschool-font “Zombo.com” banner and spinning rainbow pinwheel that suggests buffering, tinny muzak and a voice of ambiguously African accent explaining how wonderful Zombo.com is. 

“This is ZomboCom; welcome...to ZomboCom. You can do anything at ZomboCom. Anything at all. The only limit is yourself. Welcome...to ZomboCom.” 

Eventually, the site would provide a link to sign up for a newsletter, but this no longer happens, and the script simply loops around. Which is conceptually funnier.

4) No, you do not say the “dot” in Zombo.com. It’s “ZomboCom.” This has the effect of making it sound not like another random website but maybe a lifestyle, a cutting-edge technology, perhaps even a kind of transhumanist future. You have to understand, people were saying stuff like “the information superhighway” back then. The dot-com bubble had not yet burst. And when it did, Zombo.com was just fine—because business didn’t enter into it. You don’t even say the “dot.”