Sometimes the sorrows of capitalism hit you out of nowhere; one little tweet striking your little heart. In May of 2021 Yahoo! Answers was set to be euthanized, and imminently. Hoping to find remnants of my awkward pre-teen years (the last time I remember using it), I followed the instructions on what was left of the website to try to download my personal data, but I couldn’t seem to remember my log in, or some other annoying technical error. Eventually the deadline passed... passed away... and I permanently lost these relics of adolescence.

Yahoo only gave one months notice, so a lot was lost in the scramble to archive as much as possible (Mehrotra). How could they be so cruel? Frankly, because they don't care: these artifacts are personal, insignificant to the flows of technocapital. For the internet moguls, they're just clutter. "Capitalism will obliterate everything you know and love," writes a wry Kate Wagner (123).

For this entry in the Dead Media Project, I have some screenshots from the archive that I feel an emotional pull towards. All of these relate to sociality, intimacy, queerness, sexuality, and the like, as this is exactly what I gravitated towards on this platform as a child. Anonymous forums were a place to ask the things that we couldn’t elsewhere: the intimate, embarrassing, and revealing questions.

Reading this archive feels like reading a diary, or scraps of thousands of anonymous diaries collaged together, rather. It feels like listening in on countless slumber parties, once the attendees hit the sweet spot of closeness and exhaustion to start spilling the beans. Is “anonymous intimacy” an oxymoron? The contradictions cohabitate here in the Yahoo! Answers archive. The platform was just as deficient in attention as the tweens that scoured it: Even if searching within a specific category questions next to each other could be about completely different things-- it was a dizzying exploration of so many secrets.

These posts, so heavy with confusion and curiosity, sitting silently in this dead cyberspace. It’s almost hard to bear. Sure, with our contranetic use of Tor anonymity is a given. But it doesn’t quite compare to this time capsule of intimacy. We have a lot to learn.

The questions on Yahoo! Answers are revealing, revealing enough to not dared to be asked publicly. But the archive as a collection is revealing in its own way. It’s a time capsule of the aggregated social anxieties of a very particular time and place. A strikingly heteronormative, misogynistic, and frankly lonely time and place.

A self-conscious child asking what they must do in order to grow taller tells us about what children interpreted as beauty in the world. Implicit in their question is their belief that 4’6 ½” is too short for a 12 year old. What lead them to that conclusion?

A teenager searches for a sex pamphlet that doesn’t exist. They’re not asking their questions about queer sex here, at least not in this post, but they gesture toward an endemic curiosity that was going overlooked.

The “…?” here is what really strikes me. The trail-off, the question that this poster is too shy to make explicit, or maybe doesn’t even know what they’re asking. This is an artifact of permissibility: a child turning to a sea of anonymous strangers to ask permission to vaguely “do more,” whatever that may mean to them. There’s an understanding from the asker that their desire is in a social grey-zone, but they’re reaching for someone who can answer the question, not only “is this okay?” but also “is this normal?”

I can so easily imagine myself posing this question. The “first kiss” was a rite of passage, one that was so completely over-dramatized at that time. I remember wondering constantly what it felt like, what would happen. What could possibly be so magical as to get this much fanfare?

A question that’s scary to ask. Such a vulnerable confession, to admit to the experience of social alienation that we are compelled to pretend we don’t experience. How do you make friends? Everyone else seems to be doing this, why is it hard for me? But the 22 answers I think doesn’t actually point toward those people having the answer, having figured out once and for all the definitive way to make friends. It points toward a handful of people that felt this way too, once. Who knew what advice this lonely poster needed to hear.

I couldn’t find any specific posts saved in the archive; I had to scroll through the home page of recommended questions without being able to ever see the answers. But such is the ephemerality of the internet. This dead media is a somewhat lonely one, only being able to read the questions. It reads like shouts into the void, where no answer returns, where it’s hard to tell if anyone is even out there. But I can see that all of these questions did get some answers, at least by a couple of people. I hope that everyone who posted felt a little less confused than they did before, and hopefully a little less alone.

I want to hold this dead media close, not let it completely turn to dust. It was meaningful to an entire generation of kids, myself included. I hope on this contranet we can learn from the questions of my old generation: we can make those sex pamphlets for gay and lesbian teenagers, we can learn to make friends.

Sources:

Gonzalez, Alex. “What Yahoo! Answers Meant to a Generation of LGBTQ+ Kids.” Medium, 6 Apr. 2021. https://web.archive.org/web/20210622040432/https://alexgwriter.medium.com/what-yahoo-answers-meant-to-a-generation-of-lgbtq-kids-4fdfb7d90cb0. Accessed 31 May, 2021.

Mehrotra, Dhruv and Shoshana Wodinsky. "We're Archiving Yahoo Answers So You'll Always Know How Babby Is Formed." Gizmodo, 9 Apr. 2021. Accessed 22 June, 2021. https://web.archive.org/web/20210518103738/https://gizmodo.com/were-archiving-yahoo-answers-so-youll-always-know-how-b-1846643969

Screenshots by myself from Yahoo! Answers. https://web.archive.org/web/20210420233723/https://answers.yahoo.com/. Internet Archive.

Wagner, Kate. “404 Page Not Found: The Internet Feeds on Its Own Dying Dreams.” The Baffler, no. 43, Baffler Foundation, 2019, pp. 120–32.