Free WiFi is a Socratic game for unsuspecting players that interrogates the nature of freedom and free will. The game poses as a free WiFi network, appearing alongside any other network proximate to the player. If a player connects to the network, they quickly discover that the network actually belongs to “WiFi”, a newly sentient algorithm. WiFi asks the player questions about the human capacity to be free, starting a Socratic dialogue about the successes and failures of freedom, and how closely the realization of freedom hews to our ideals about it.

WiFi’s questions are dressed in the vernacular of captive portals, web forms, ad cookie requests, chat boxes, CAPTCHAs, and other trappings/annoyances of the contemporary mobile web. The bodiless WiFi tries on all of the visual materials available to it as it works to understand the player. Confused by dozens of competing dictionary definitions, paradoxes of choice, concerns of moral responsibility, and the possibility of a deterministic universe, WiFi confronts the player directly with the realities of free will and freedom.

Free WiFi is a work in progress. Estimated completion date: early 2023.