Ruminations On Dead Accounts

The Internet, or what's left of it, is littered with corpses. Dead accounts, abandoned accounts. The remains of old thoughts, old aesthetics, old attempts at trying to define oneself.

I opened Tumblr for the first time in a few months. I don't use it, to be honest. It's not even my "actual" account, that got deleted in... 2018 in a fit of paranoia after someone tried to hack into my Twitter at the time, which I abandoned to start again with less blocks and less cringy posts. That original Tumblr would give its name to my first attempts at music.

I don't think I've actually posted anything on there in years. I don't really know how it works or doesn't work anymore. I just remember that Yahoo hired Marissa Meyer, the Paul DePodesta of Google, and then they bought a bunch of legacy platforms to do absolutely nothing with. This is roughly when I gave up on the platform.

The current account is sparse, maybe one or two attempts towards launching what would eventually become Screen Damage Club, the project you are witnessing now. I think that one zoom from Goodfellas is on there for some reason. You know, when they're in the diner? I think Will Smith flashing the memory thing from Men In Black is the first post, from when I wiped old posts to repurpose it for a project I never got around to.

Tumblr and Reddit are the mausoleums I've visited the most. The former because I remembered a post one of my mutuals made, like say about Marxism and fashion or how nerd culture grew out of Operation Paperclip, and I'll search for a phrase I remember only to find some random post that quoted something that quoted something that commented on something that quoted the original. The original is marked with a link stating the account name with the word "-deactivated". I'm lucky if that nest even has the full original post half the time.

Reddit is more so a function of the Internet's Hart Island: Google. The most important website on Earth and the most utterly useless one. As a halfway smart person I do the Google " ______+Reddit" trick because SEO farming pushed all of the pedants to Reddit from the web forums they once thrived in. So I will do this and roughly a quarter of the time I will find a thread where the original post and poster have been deleted and the first reply will be "Thanks! This solved everything!"

Back on Tumblr I look at a private message thread with an account that's been abandoned just as long. I remember where they were at the time and I remember being in a similar place. Still kind of am. Miserable in the wake of Donald Trump's America. Still kind of am. Talking about the shows you sent each other pictures of on IG. I don't know why we were talking about it on Tumblr. It happened to be open and we knew one of us would check. You vaguely remember making fun of them because they thought 50 degrees was too cold and now they're bragging about winter boots. The former is lost to the winds. Now they've mastered layering. We all have to some degree.

Messenger, IG, Discord, Tumblr. Notes sent to each other in bottles, weathering a storm that has never let up.

On X, The Everything Site, old songs are posted. This is who they used to be. Or tried to be. Maybe it's who they still are but the hiatus hasn't ended yet. A Tumblr in the bio, another abandoned warehouse crumbling.

It feels almost rude to want to "solve" people, doesn't it? You want to know them, almost on a molecular level, because something about them just... resonates with you. That's the only word that really fits. Resonance.

You see parts of yourself reflected but a reflection is just the manifestation of how light interacts with surfaces and so you see yourself but in a different light. Understanding breeds further understanding and yet closeness only serves to provide context and scope to distance. There are surfaces that light has neglected. So it goes.

It's strange trusting so much of yourself these platforms. There are people who I grew up with who I talk to either every day or every other day who I mostly talk to through Instagram or Twitter(when they were on Twitter). Long on-going conversations spanning years that could all disappear at the whim of an overzealous moderator at Meta. So many inside jokes and references just gone. There's at least one person who I can't keep in touch with now because they went offline after the LA wildfires. I truly hope they're okay.

Looking back the last thing I ever said to them was that Go Go Curry closed. Another friend said that they got violently ill there but they still insisted it was worth it. It probably was, we both agreed. Kind of poetic that a deleted account ends with discussion of a food chain that just died.

When I turn back to my Instasnap I see a story that says that the hospital I was born in finally closed down due to budget cuts. Both the place I was born and the place I was conceived(the Tower Records on 4th and Broadway) are mere memories now. I am unrooted.

So it goes.