in a 2023 hallowstream you mentioned something like "forgetting is good" or something along the lines of forgetting is important alongside preservation and remembering (specifically in the context of archives, and internet, tying into hallowstreams being ephemeral and not put up on youtube) and i was wondering if you had readings that led you to that conclusion!
hello yes -- this is something that i think about a lot, actually, as someone who is a huge proponent of forgetful data. i've separated my answer into three parts: forgetting hallowstream, forgetting data, and data afterlives. below is a rambling essay that intermingles my own feelings about growing up online, digital recordkeeping, and how the internet became a marketing tool instead of an archive... but at the end i have a far more practical bibliography/recommended reading list.
- forgetting hallowstream
hallowstream is a yearly horror stream i do with my partner, jack, and we'll have done it for seven years this year. to my memory, we've played until dawn, silent hill 2, fatal frame: crimson butterfly, majora's mask, control, and signalis. despite its longevity & pretty high consistent turnout, you wouldn't know about it if you went looking for any VODs or youtube videos or anything like that from me/us. i don't know if the streets have caught wise & people are storing their own copies, but we don't make them publicly available aside from some local copies on hard drives.
we keep hallowstream off the 'net for a few reasons. primarily, i like the idea of moments getting forgotten. it kind of freaks me out that everything is happening on this internet all at once, on a pretty flat plane, expanding out (for what seems like) forever. there are few things that immediately imply the 'age' of a digital object, and even fewer tells for webpages and online videos. there are some things, like outdated file formats or 480p video, that suggest a technical age. but what is an aesthetic of aged online? what gives that same feeling as a yellowing photograph in a shoebox? a geocities page with a scrollbar that reads UNDER CONSTRUCTION? times new roman on infinite, pale yellow backgrounds? downloadable courier new notepad documents? an affect? a forum signature? the word 'netiquette'? how do i say, "this happened once, way back then, but it can't be like that ever again"?
i think it's fair and right and good to let your life online expire. i'm not who i was in 2017 and i never will be again. maybe i said something stupid, or i didn't know enough to say something right, or i'm too earnest or i'm just kind of embarrassing. why should that version of me get preserved in amber, replayable, ad infinitum? why should i maintain it if the links break, or the videos don't upload, or the audio doesn't work?
on the other hand, it's really not so deep. there's a lot of me out there on the internet, and some of it is very embarrassing. some of it is good. you can just as easily watch me play a nancy drew game on youtube as you could read something i wrote to pay the bills nearly a decade ago. just the other week i wrote a review on google maps because someone who helped me out in the world was nice. whatever, who am i to judge!
ultimately, for hallowstream, it's just what suits us best. i think there's a little bit of comfort that comes from knowing that we invest a lot of energy into something that a lot of people can experience in real time, together, and then kind of disappears. there's less pressure, less expectation, more fun, more anticipation. that's not to say that old hallowstreams will never be available ever again, but if they are, it'll be different. i think it's important to recognise that.
- forgetting data
hey it is weird that i grew up online. it is weird that if i hadn't deleted them, my teenage blogs and confessional diary entries would be out there, scrapable, searchable, printable, copy-and-pasteable, password lost and unretrievable. i think about how many other people didn't think to delete their livejournals or xangas or neopets shop update logs and have strange impressions of themselves living on elsewhere. i didn't think much of this at 18, 19, and 20 when the internet still kind of felt like a place you went and wasn't "of things," seeping into every corner of my day-to-day life. the internet doesn't have boundaries, now, and it claws at everything. i don't want google maps to suggest a menu item for me when i arrive at my destination. i don't want zoom to make me an AI-generated summary of my meeting. i think you should erase the parts of you that get fed into a corporate greed machine, model, and algorithm. it sucks that the digital archive is marketable and i think you should be a luddite if you can. it sucks that my facebook profile helped build a predictive ad campaign machine. that's a nightmare sentence. we're in the torment nexus.
i think you can fix it. i think it is vital to create spaces that are, for lack of a better word, digitally inaccessible. bring back the uninstagrammable hang. ungram your heart. i used to believe that sharing a photo on instagram of your experiences in a physical place "activated" it -- it invited others into your moment, connecting you to a network of others who shared your same interest, like echoing yourself out into the world and hearing someone else's voice call back to you. i wish i still believed this. i am finding it harder and harder to believe this when everything that helped to contribute to that formative sense of connection now lines some megabillionaire's pockets.
the thing i like most about the internet is remembering it. i like remembering what it felt like. i like connecting with others, in real time, about places we both went online when we were kids. we piece together a map of now-defunct forums, games, webcomics, blogs. gaia online! deviantart! neopets!!! those things don't exist now and the worst thing the digital archive can do is trick us into thinking we can go back there again just because it looks and feels like it did when it worked. we can't pretend that a collection of screenshots, even really high fidelity ones or interactive ones or ones that move in real time can really capture the dynamism in a moment. remember when donald trump got covid? remember watching the tweets roll in, piecing it together, the jokes, the feverish & absurd & heady quality of the air? maybe that was just me. but you can't put that in a box. that doesn't go in the metadata. we can't pretend that it does.
- data afterlives
GDPR is the bare minimum. you should be allowed to set an expiration date for your data. personally, i want to grow old and waste away and i want my data to do the same. i find this difficult to reconcile with my hope for a comprehensive, representative, accessible digital archive. i believe, wholeheartedly, in end-user access and outreach and making records freely available for research. i think i would feel differently if there was anywhere i could go online that was untouched by AWS or cloudflare or google or whatever. i want to print out the internet and let it compost. i want people 100 years from now to know about neopets. i want people to stop making 16GB tiff files of dead presidents letters. i want the local, community run archive of small town newspapers to have $1,000,000. i want to hold a funeral for my livejournal. i think you should make a zine about your favorite wikipedia talk page. i want to know if it is now safe to turn off my computer
- here are four things that i suggest you read. i have kept this list short to be useful and not showy. michel foucault is not here. instead, here are two books and a few articles, one academic and one popular press. i will always want to read more about this, so please send me what you like to read!
Foote, Kenneth. “To Remember and Forget: Archives, Memory, and Culture.” The American Archivist 53, no. 3 (July 1, 1990): 378–92. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.53.3.d87u013444j3g6r2.
Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor. Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage, 2021.
Winn, Samantha R. “Dying Well In the Anthropocene: On the End of Archivists.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 1 (May 17, 2020). https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v3i1.107.
BmoreArt. “The Internet Is Not An Archive,” March 19, 2020. https://bmoreart.com/2020/03/the-internet-is-not-an-archive.html.
