The Compression Zone is a video-game essay that explores compression algorithms as one of the primary engines of world-making in our era. Shaheer performs the game live, navigating a perilous, multi-resolution dungeon where all the world’s data is sent to be compressed. Part autobiographical, part grounded in archival research on twentieth-century nationalism, and partly besieged by memes and conspiracy, the essay moves through uneven resolutions of rendering and rigour—journeying across South Asia’s digital borderlands, through fiber-optic cables in the Pacific, and across Utah’s icy reality TV landscape.