The Ephemerality of Our Digital Lives
Thinking about Jadzia, C.G., and our ephemeral digital lives
Last month, a post crossed my Mastodon feed. On Josh Renaud's breakintochat.com, it linked to a simple obituary that informed about the death of one C. Learn Jr. C.G. Learn, as Josh knew him, ran a public TradeWars 2002 server, and Renaud ran a gateway to it from his own BBS.
This was not just a novelty post-1990s, this was something important to Renaud and his family. His daughter passed away in 2020, and when she was growing up, he set up a family BBS (a lovely idea) which had message areas, games, all the trappings the online experience of 1993 had to offer.
She grew up on it, somewhat: posted messages to the family, but mostly (like, I think, a lot of us) she was there for the games. TradeWars 2002, like some other games, has mechanisms for leaving messages, and as he was processing the grief from his daughter's death, Renaud asked C.G. if he still had that server, to search for any text his daughter Jadzia may have left.
C.G. did in fact still have that server, and he brought it back online, allowing Renaud to hunt further traces of his daughter's short and ephemeral online life. It's a touching post, and one that reminds me that a lot of what I was doing years ago could be (but realistically, isn't) archived on an ancient drive in an aging sysop's closet a province west of here. It reminds me also of the so many things I've necessarily forgotten as I've aged. Who was I talking to? What about? I remember a few aliases. A few conversations. One of the most exciting eras of my life, but also, without a doubt, the worst. I'm here, barely.
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The ephemerality of our online lives in the face of an internet we were told would forget nothing is an enormous irony. I pulled my LiveJournal archive, post by post, getting locked out and rate-limited in the process. My old journals from websites whose URLs I haven't forgotten, whose contents were saved by the Wayback. A couple emails. More than anything I wish I had all my old ICQ and AIM messages. The magic in those long evenings. Last month on Facebook, a friend mentioned to me that her mental image of me, of so many others, was frozen in the years of our late teens. Our own history a tangle, an almost-was, and definitely a mess. I'm glad she said it. I'm glad it's not just me.
I think it's true for a lot of us that we have a particular era we keep coming back to. It's not like I peaked, or anything like that - I was a bit of a shambles, coming to grips with what was at the time undiagnosed OCD, dealing with what my therapist decades later described as unprocessed PTSD from an incident a half-decade before. But there were two years, and one in particular, that felt like I was casting off my skin. I was talking to people, beginning to trust people again. I've read the entirety of what I've collected from that era: it's a lot, it's not enough, and I keep wishing I could stumble on more.
But it's gone. I know it is. The years before the mass ingestion of data, before the creation of the sprawling surveillance apparatus we have today, are now vast black stretches in the night sky. I fell for people (& one in particular), we made plans, and they of course never happened, each of us going our separate ways. Both of us east. Away from each other. I was never able to visit. I've always wondered if she got tired of waiting for me to find a way.
I wish I had more than that. Not just of those conversations with her, but just, everything. I wish I had more that the maddeningly incomplete traces of my early online life. Not for, as with Renaud, reasons of grief, but reasons of remembrance instead. The people who were at the time the brighest lights in my life have dimmed and flickered. Some I've lost contact with altogether. I wish I could remember more about what they were to me then. I wish I could tell them they meant something to me, once. And that, despite the lack of details, the lack of resolution, they surely always will.