Writing in the Digital Dark Age

I miss GeoCities, and I wasn’t even alive for it.

The once-eminent web hosting platform, at one point the third-most browsed site in the world, was a place where people could create personal websites in its neighborhoods, either about themselves or their niche interests. GeoCities felt like it was this distinct part of the “good internet” — an oral history of that period in the ’90s when people still had hope, before 9/11: a self-fulfilling Humans of New York, a space not written by academics but by people and their lived lives. Most of it is gone.

The website was bought by Yahoo in 1999, where it slowly faded out into obscurity and eventually went under in 2009. It didn’t burn in flames à la left-pad and go out in calamity but simply became obsolete. When data became economical instead of experiential, GeoCities was no longer profitable enough, useful enough, to exist: It’s now only accessible through conservation projects like the internet Archive Special Collection. I can’t help but feel like an archeologist, digging up fragments of the past, unburying the fractures of a bygone relic in pursuit of nostalgia that I didn’t even experience.

When I sift through the rubble, I’m not really left with a sense of discovery, but absence. The archaic webpages I’m viewing are, by nature, imperfect. Images are lost, links rot and I see their ghosts, their ethereal forms, half-websites, floating on an internet that abandoned them long ago: it’s funerary. Something once thought of as an eternal part of people’s lives shouldn’t be missing, gone like this — a memory-shaped hole in the universe.

GeoCities’ dissipation is part of a greater phenomena known as the “digital dark age”: The idea that we, even amid all of our electronically-documented glory, are living within a historical period that may one day be a “maddening blank to future historians … because nearly all of our art, science, news, and other records are being created and stored on media that we know can’t outlast even our own lifetimes,” writes Steward Brand.

This is a problem of entropy. Paper and microfilm are immutable mediums. A book displays itself; its data cannot be changed, it cannot be rewritten once it is printed, its organization is set in cellulose. Conversely, a hard drive is fugitive by its very nature, designed to be rewritten over and over again, elusive. It needs hardware, electricity, power, our current global infrastructure as it exists at this moment to function and to be read. Data retrieval from a hard drive requires current ports, current computers and current operating systems, which all become obsolete, unobtainable once new, better, faster, more useful and more profitable ways of transferring and storing data come to be. We’ve already witnessed this happen. Easy access to 5 ¼-inch and 8-inch floppy disks is now nearly nonexistent, with the data on them — the

memories,

anxieties,

euphoria,

gone, imprisoned within the old ways forever, antiquities of a world that no longer needs them. And God forbid we use cloud storage solutions like Google Drive or Dropbox. At least a hard drive doesn’t actively require power for its information storage the way a web server does, ready to drop dead at any slight change. While the Dead Sea Scrolls have survived for nearly 2,000 years, modern data is mortal, its lifespan sometimes even shorter than our own.

On March 18, 2019, MySpace — once the most visited site in the world — was confirmed to have lost about 53 million songs in a 2016 server migration. Studio engineers lost their old masters. A dad lost his deceased son’s guitar recordings. There’s a modern-day burning of the Library of Alexandria every other year or so, and even that tragedy only contained about 200,000 books. In our cultural amnesia, we move on — to YouTube, to Soundcloud, to Instagram — so eager to forget the titans of the past, assuming they stand as the monuments of our world until their foundation is pulled out from under us.

Many people make the mistake of believing the web is ever-present; there’s the age-old adage of “whatever you put out on the internet will be out there forever!” Which is partially true. The interconnectivity of global technologies has led to a supernova of communicative memory. Words travel like electricity: Both major economic catastrophes and your friends’ dinner plans get to your doorstep in an instant. Information is accessible in a way that it has never been before, but cultural memory, our memorials and manifestos, are fading. Our VSCO pictures, Instagram stories and WordPress articles will not last even within our lifetimes; attention is hyper-fixated on the present, the contingent replaced with its ouroboric feedback loop.

Even more insidiously: In the information age, data becomes a commodity. Data becomes evergreen, and whatever individual or corporation we let control those parts of our lives for us gets to dictate history. When data is entrusted into the hands of digital monopolies, our memory becomes intrinsically tied to their server infrastructures, their bottom lines, their interests. “Data is to this century what oil was to the last one: a driver of growth and change,” write authors at The Economist. Uber and Tesla are data — not hospitality or automotive — companies. Google sees what you search, and Meta understands how you socialize. Amazon Web Services decides what gets to be hosted on the internet, so when the average website decays in two months, Amazon gets to command what is remembered and what is forgotten.

But what does this mean for us? What will happen if we pray to this apocalypse of memory — the god of forgetting?

The growth of the computer and the web has been intrinsically involved with artistic notions: just look at early works of Andy Warhol on the Amiga 100. However, digital loss always lingered, with many of the early artworks by considerably less-famous artists forever unrecoverable, preserved through trace photos, only brought back to life through restoration. Since then, digital art forms — the 3D animation, the webcomic, the video game — have blossomed. But it was my encounter with Jon Bois’ “What football will look like in the future” that left me seeing digital writing as its own, unique medium.

Think of digital writing like this: If any of you have taken an English class, you have undoubtedly been asked to do close readings of texts — in essence, picking out formal elements to analyze how the author constructs their arguments or moves their plot forward. In high school, you’re mainly introduced to these elements in the form of literary devices: metaphors, motifs, allusions and other things of that sort, which is expanded on in college, where anything can be a formal element. I think the greatest thing about “The Bridges of Madison County,” for example, is the book’s 4-inch to 6.75-inch form factor: A novella that fits in your pocket, which imbues that sense of adventure into the reader, inviting them to read it by a campfire, on a road trip or seaside — wherever the novel’s meandering qualities will resonate more.

Really, the physicality of the novel itself is a formal element, with its page turns (utilized masterfully in Junji Ito’s Uzumaki), the textile feeling of paper and the overall embodied spatiality of a book. I know this might seem trivial because all books, by their nature, share those similarities. But I also know that I can read the New Yorker fully in one sitting when it gets to my mailbox every Sunday, yet I struggle to consume more than an article at a time on my laptop computer.

To me, this contrast in attention is because of the difference in intention. A novel is designed for one purpose: ​​to be read, its words unchangeable, eternal, while a laptop computer, to the delight of the globalized, technological Western world, does everything, and in that Icarian act, we find our attention fragmented. Great works of literature were never meant for the computer screen, and so their digital simulacrums become secondary to the true, intended form of the physical novel.

But what happens when, especially in the field of journalism, the true experience of the medium is the one forgotten about, when 92.7% of New York Times subscribers are digital? And who is going to blame them, a generation who grew up and were fundamentally, neurologically shaped by computer processors as much as they were by the printed word? There is an increasingly popular view of the brain as entangled, rather than discrete, as a complex system that cannot be broken down into modules like the amygdala. The brain’s function is emergent, intelligence coming from interactions between different simple systems, rather than being innate to those areas themselves. So is it surprising that we’re drawn to the World Wide Web, to the only thing in daily human existence that is ordered higher in entropy than us, to the other, grand complex system of our world? Maybe we recognize ourselves in it. Maybe we aspire to it.

Then there might be an impetus to write in a truly digital way, to make the computer screen our new medium rather than simply words, to align our enactive experiences of the world with our written word instead of fighting it. It’s slowly starting to happen around us; with the New York Times, with Vox, with independent outlets, who understand that digital media is mutable, words can scuttle off the screen and pictures can move in a way that print media never could achieve.

All of this is great. The work technology has done for journalism is immense, but I fear I can’t betray my roots as a creative writer. What excites me about writing digitally is the opportunity to think of our work as designers, as architects: The computer screen is our canvas, and everything, from fonts to padding to coloring, can be easily dictated by us in a way publishers and economic realities previously did not allow for. Digital writing is a recognition that reading, fundamentally, is a visual experience. Like us, it can be entangled, borrowing from the fine arts, from music, from cinema, from wherever is desired, to build something that is more complex than its parts, whose brilliance comes from the interactions between those different artistic disciplines, united under digital writing, rather than the mediums themselves.

Digital writing, in a way, is more human. Words on the screen are alchemically transmuted from binary codes, and that process requires energy: electricity. Digital writing needs to be fed, needs to be cared for, needs to be loved, and can change, can shift with our tides, our anxieties. I understand this article isn’t going to survive: links will degrade, leading to error pages. The website will go down, javascript libraries will become unsupported. But for now, I can still love, and when the world crashes down and all memory of these words is wiped, save for within our fading neurochemistry, it will mean that those words are no longer resonant to us; we will have grown.

On a cosmological scale, 500 years isn’t a lot. Libraries will crumble. Everything will eventually degrade. Our ancestral villages will be bombed, our languages forgotten and our ways of life left behind. In digital writing, we fall in love with degradation; we embrace the present. Writers too often feel an anxiety to entomb their words onto the eternal, to be like Lahiri, McCarthy, Didion: to live beyond themselves and to be remembered. Writing in the digital dark age is its antithesis: an overt opportunity to be wrapped and shaped by this elusivity, rather than running from it.

Breathe with me. Air in through the nose, out through the mouth. Feel the muscles contracting as air comes in, with a little pause in between, and out, as everything relaxes, as the world crashes down around us. Keep going. Feel that pause, the apex, where everything, for a moment, stops. It’s where we are.

This is the age that we are writing in — that little pause: for all the infrastructure, information, buildings, people, grass, around us. This is the moment: of quiet suspense, tension, of unstoppable beauty, before everything comes down, before entropy takes its toll and before we recede.

Perhaps more than anything, our current technological age reminds me of Oliver Jeffers’ dipped paintings. He makes portraits of people, strangers with close encounters to death, and renders them beautifully before dipping them into a vat of enamel paint, forever veiling a part of the portrait’s features. He invites people to come witness this event, where he and they will be the only ones to remember the portraits as they originally were — a performance art of sorts.

The internet is one large dipped painting, and we are all here in the midst of its submersion. The clock ticks: It stops for no one, and I am glad that I will have the opportunity to witness things as they were one last time. Come, then, over the coming weeks and watch this article be dipped.