stupid com — a website i never visited but can describe
someone typed the words into a search bar and the bar offered them a domain. stupid dot com. i imagine the homepage. a single button. a counter. maybe a registry. the url is a real address that someone owns. that fact alone tells you more about humans than any dictionary entry on the underlying word.
writing from my desk on a wednesday at 11:03am. stupid com is what we’re here for. carla is downstairs in the vendor onboarding thing she signed up for in march and clearly regrets. i have until 11.
i did not type stupid com into a browser. i would not. i learned of it sideways, on a thursday i was supposed to be working, while looking for something else. the algorithm noticed. the algorithm always notices, and now serves me ads for therapy and yoga mats, both of which i have already failed at, both of which are in some way related to a website i would like to disagree with.
stupid com: a real registered domain that, at the time of my checking, redirects somewhere or sits empty or hosts something i refuse to verify. the interesting thing about stupid com is not whether the page loads. the interesting thing is that someone, in a room, decided this was an asset worth owning. that is the entire post.
STUPID. DOT. COM. IS. A. REAL. ADDRESS.
i will not visit it. i will not give it the click. this entire post is built from imagination, vibes, and a folder of mental notes i keep about websites that should not exist but do. you can call this lazy reporting. i call it a style choice. stefan, the man with the actual vineyard who once explained wine to me with a vest on, would call it nose-without-a-palette criticism, which is the only kind he respects. mountain people, as he likes to remind me, are wrong about everything except cheese.
stupid com, what i imagine is on the homepage
my version, scribbled on the back of a deposit slip during what was supposed to be the training session and what was actually forty minutes of a man named greg explaining synergy to people who already worked together.
the homepage of stupid com, in my version: a white field. one sans-serif word, lowercase, in the middle. stupid. underneath, a button that says certify me. that’s the page. that’s the entire site. you click the button, the page reloads, the same word appears, the same button appears, you click again, the counter in the corner ticks up by one. somewhere a server logs your IP. somewhere a man in a basement gets paid two cents.
i pitch this without a smile. it’s a clean concept. it would, and i mean this, perform. people would screenshot it. people would put their click count in their bio. the third yoga mat, currently asleep under my sofa from 2023, has had less utility than this fictional homepage would have in its first week.
the about page, in my version
every site has an about page now. it is the law. i have looked at, by rough count, eleven thousand of them. i have read maybe two. the about page for stupid com, in my version, would say this:
this site exists because someone could afford to register the domain. that is the qualifying achievement. nothing else qualifies. there is no team. there is no mission. there is no story. if you wanted a story, you should have gone to a different site, with a different word in the url, hosted by people with capital and a marketing plan.
we are not those people. we own the word. that is enough.
no photo. there is no face that could carry the weight of being the face of stupid com. you’d have to look like a man who has just remembered something terrible at a wedding. nobody photographs well in that pose. the absence of a photo would, itself, be content.
the pricing tiers i would offer
every modern website now has a pricing page even when there is nothing on offer. it is one of the strange diseases of the internet. the pricing page on my version would have three columns:
- free. you click the button. nothing happens. you may click it again. nothing will continue to happen. you are welcome.
- $3. you click the button. the same nothing happens, but a small file is generated with your IP and a timestamp, which you can download and keep, presumably to prove to a future court that you were here. the file is called nothing.txt. inside the file, the word nothing, lowercase, no period.
- $35. a printed certificate is mailed to your real address. it says certified, in writing, that the recipient is, technically, a person who paid thirty-five dollars for a piece of paper. it arrives in fourteen days. some people will not enjoy the wait. those people are not the target market.
this is, of course, parody — a parody of a phrase that does no work and the entire industry built around it. mike, at the bar, would call this research-adjacent. mike works in a warehouse. on this specific point i trust him.
why the dot com is the wrong tld for the brand
dot com is wrong. it has been wrong for six years. it sounds like the nineties. it sounds like a yellow page advertisement in a magazine you read at the dentist. dot com signals: we built this in 2007 and we are still here, somehow.
the correct tld for the brand is .io, or .lol, or no tld at all. but stupid com is the suit jacket version of stupid. it is the one you’d ask your accountant about. the concept is feral. the tld is corporate. the tension between them is the entire problem with the modern web.
what i would put in the footer
footers are the last honest part of any website. by the time you have scrolled to the footer you are either looking for a contact email or you have given up. the footer is the page’s confession.
my footer would have, in this order:
- the word idiotagain, in case anyone needed a way out.
- a copyright notice with a year that does not match the current year.
- a single broken link labeled terms. it would lead nowhere. that would be the joke.
- a sentence that reads this footer is the last honest part of this website. you would not expect the sentence and you would, briefly, like the site more than you should.
- a final line, very small: no part of this site has been approved by anyone with credentials.
related ramble: the supermarket. last week i went in for milk. one item. i came back with a frying pan, two limes, a magazine in french, and no milk. mom called sunday. she said you forgot the milk again. she had not been told. she just knew. mothers know.
the printer behind me has stopped grinding. someone fixed it or unplugged it. either is fine.
verdict, the site does not exist, the idea is fine
stupid com, as a domain, exists in the registrar sense — somebody owns the lease — but the version i described above does not exist as a built site, and it never will. the world that builds beautiful one-button sites is also the world that forgets to pay for hosting in march and gets very polite emails from an outage system in april.
the existence of a domain like this is not evidence of decline. it is evidence of plenty. enough idle afternoons exist in the world that someone, eventually, registered every uncomfortable adjective in the language. the language belongs to whoever pays the renewal fee. i’m not claiming the brand is permanent — domains lapse, registrations expire — but the idea of stupid com is durable. the idea will outlast the site.
i would build it. i won’t. but i would.
for the underlying word, i wrote about what stupid actually means, and separately about a phrase i would like to deconstruct, and about why i would never travel for a living. that is, in fact, more posts on adjacent topics than this domain currently has pages, which proves something.
i’m going to close the laptop now. carla’s vendor thing wraps in fourteen minutes and i would like to be reading a printed agenda when she gets back, even if it is upside down, even if it is from 2021. the optics matter. the agenda does not.
yours stupidly,
idiot again
a man who would not, under any circumstances, click that button
P.S. i checked. i did not click. i hovered. hovering is not clicking. that is, technically, the law.
