“It’s a lot of work, but it’s a lot of fun.”: Rediscovering Hypertext in Jon Bois’ What Football Will Look Like in the Future

Abstract

This paper offers a close reading of Jon Bois’ 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future as an example of “feral hypertext,” situating the work within both the history of literary hypertext and broader postmodern narrative traditions. Emerging from a popular media context rather than an academic or experimental one, 17776 combines text, GIFs, maps, and video within a linear, scrolling interface to produce a distinctive multimedia narrative about boredom, immortality, and play. We argue that, rather than adhering to canonical models of hypertext defined by branching structure and reader choice, Bois’ work reconfigures hypertextuality through temporal layering, collage aesthetics, and the aggregation of networked media. In doing so, it both reflects and departs from earlier hypertext theory, which emphasised nonlinearity, authorial decentring, and reader agency. By placing 17776 alongside postmodern fiction (particularly the work of David Foster Wallace) we demonstrate how its themes of boredom, abstraction, and simulated space align with concepts such as hyperreality and depthlessness, while also engaging with the affective mode associated with the “New Sincerity.” The paper argues that 17776 exemplifies a broader shift in hypertext from a clearly bounded literary form to a dispersed, vernacular practice embedded within contemporary web culture. This case highlights the limitations of existing critical frameworks and argues for renewed attention to emergent, noncanonical works, suggesting that hypertext persists not as a fixed structure but as an evolving mode of cultural production.