The Internet Is Forever

(This article was originally written in 2017)

The internet is kind of magic. I push a key on a board and it is a letter. Letters become words, bits become bytes, data travels through the air, to a router, to a cable, a server, another cable, under the sea, to you.

I will never not love submarine cable maps

Every day we create and consume content that exists only as some sequence of electrons and photons, somehow preserved in the ether. 

And by ether I mean a server farm.

Doesn't that blow your fucking mind sometimes?

Years ago I discovered this ridiculous website: Should You Date Nate

I couldn't stop laughing at this guy and the responses he was getting. In a frenzy, I made a parody: Should You Date Kate. I mean, our names rhymed - had to be done.

Sadly, Nate already took down his manifesto and put up something else instead, perhaps claiming it was a joke all along. So my parody didn't quite work anymore.The internet moved on. Nate was a blip in internet fame. Nate + Kate never had a chance.

Web sites are notoriously bad at staying put. Nate takes his site down long after anyone is paying attention, I stop paying for my parody domain, Blogger will stop existing, a plug is pulled, a flood, an apocalypse, the electrons stop moving. So it goes.

The internet is forever sort of, thanks to web archiving like WayBack machine. A set of servers located in California that essentially stores backups of pushlished content on the internet. You can actually track all the published iterations of Should You Date Nate if you wanted to.  (I did and I did).

In graduate school I had a dating blog: OKStoopid. Reading it is pretty cringe-worthy now but in a weird way I miss it. I miss creating and feeling inspired to create. Everywhere I looked I would find something funny about being single or dating or relationships. I know inspiration, like romance perhaps, comes and goes. Over time I gave up on it.

When I'm in a creative rut I'll do an audit of all the weird content I've created over the years, the silly stuff that still exists in pockets of the internet, and wonder if there is some way to tie it all together somehow. I still haven't figured that out. 

Maybe it's ok that all that content exists in different pockets, mostly preserved, but some harder to find. Maybe it's ok to intermittently create weird content and release it to the ether whenever the creativity strikes, all the nothing and the everything of it all at once. The creating is more important than the creation. The process more than the product.