I'm sure it's significant that I lost a once-very close friend shortly after beginning this work. I've been scavenging my personal archive looking for our relics. Photos, messages, anything. I've been scrolling through our messages on so many different platforms, and been confronted by so many "content no longer available" posts that they had once sent me with such excitement. Links she sent alongside the message "MEEEEE!!!" Who knows what they once were.
But this idea came before I learned about her death. I've been itching with an untraceable grief for at least a couple of years now, hoping to articulate what is so increasingly alienating about the internet.
Tiqqun once wrote "Empire is everywhere where nothing happens." With the sterility of social media, where all content one produces is on the platform's terms, this sentiment feels apt. The internet is boring, it doesn't feel like something I can peruse for fun anymore; As Dan Nosowitz's Intelligencer article proclaims: "I Don't Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore."
But there's things that have brought me comfort during this process. I've spoken with friends who feel the same way, read sources that articulate my overwhelming feelings, and discovered web-surfing tactics that have provided some much-needed relief. I'm reminded of the situationists' project. Psychogeography: the study of the social, emotional, and behavioral effects of geographical environments. The psychogeographical experiment, dérive:
"In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there." (Debord cited in Elias 822).
As predictive algorithms improve and our choice in content sources narrows, the internet as we know it tries to push us in certain directions of movement. It takes work to find things that aren't catered to you. And this sucks!
The situationists believed that
"Reinventing physical space was the means to reinventing leisure, but also it was the means to renewing perception ... and thus radically challenging the alienation and boredom generated by the capitalist specacle" (Elias 825).
I want to introduce you to some surfing practices that have comforted me, that have been a dérive-esque adventure-- with the hopes that they can challenge the boredom and alienation in the geography of cyberspace.
First there is a game I play whenever I'm feeling annoyed with the relentless scrolling on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, or whatever platform I'm fixated on. A common default file name for photos and videos is "IMG" plus a four digit number. It's not hard to make a very basic random number generator in the terminal of your computer, but you can also just choose whatever random numbers that your brain spits out. I go to Flickr or YouTube (these have had the most promising results, though I'm sure there are more) and just search IMG 3849, or IMG 2839, or IMG 1830, etc. Sometimes I'll add a filter that limits the search to a particular date range if I'm feeling particularly nostalgic. Funny, strange, sweet, gross, weird, lovely... it's all there. I encourage you to try this, or even build on it.
There's a website petittube that will randomly supply you with a youtube video with zero views, something that is almost impossible to just stumble upon.
This one's a bit different, but still satiates my nosy desire for weirdness. The archive.org folks have compiled a folder of really poorly formatted military slideshows. Turns out military members rarely have a sharp eye for design. They even started a game called Military Industrial Powerpoint Complex Karaoke, where you have to give a presentation for one of these beautifully ugly slideshows you've never seen before.
I scroll through missed connections on the regular, but haven't found a way to randomize this process. Craigslist makes no attempts to cater posts to your interests, other than where you set your location to be, so there's sort of an element of randomness in itself.
People at the Instagram account / YouTube channel "collected searching" collect silly searches from various search engine database leaks. You can also peruse them yourself. though the files are pretty hefty. A movie has even been made about one user's (#711391) history.
I'm sure there's more out there. There has to be. There must be, by which I mean: we must make it so. Let's do it. Invent games, archive the oddities that are precious to you, tell your friends. Media dies, maybe inevitably. But I know that in twenty-four years I'll want beautiful memories to look back on.
Syd White, 2021.
Sources:
Elias, Amy J. “Psychogeography, Detournement, Cyberspace.” New Literary History, vol. 41, no. 4, Autumn 2010, pp. 821-845.
Nosowitz, Dan. "I Don't Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore." Intelligencer, 14 May. 2021. https://web.archive.org/web/20210702195621/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/05/i-dont-know-how-to-waste-time-on-the-internet-anymore.html
Images:
"IMG_3756" by Ken Nguyen Nguyen. Public Domain. https://web.archive.org/web/20210702195715/https://www.flickr.com/photos/136793699@N05/34769155355/
"Ziggy Y2K" by Ziggyman3069. Blingee: https://blingee.com/blingee/view/46369029-Ziggy-Y2K?list_type=1028&query=y2k&offset=23
"IMG_4756" by Deacon Ben Agustin. Public Domain. https://web.archive.org/web/20210702195933/https://www.flickr.com/photos/benagustin/49582988201/