“Shock” websites, which confront their viewers with unexpected and unpleasant material, came into existence in the early history of the World Wide Web.The content of these websites—usually pictures or animations grotesquely depicting sexual or violent scenes—is often complemented by coding that frustrates users’ ability to navigate away from the pages. The increasing cultural visibility of shock sites such as Goatse and 2girls1cup invites investigation of their signifying processes.While the material depicted is semantically shocking, the form of these websites administers a syntactic shock in the form of a sudden loss of volition, disrupting an Internet user’s assumptions about the organization of information on the Web and preying on expectations about the Internet’s navigability.Keywords: shock websites, Internet syntax, initial experience, transitivization.