Re: The ephemeral blog post
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken.
Usually one of the last things I do when I remake the ol’e blog is drop in another version of my stream-of-conscious manifesto on the volatile web. It’s the ephemeral one that pays some tribute to the right to be forgotten. It exists on the same tubes with Internet that is constantly saving and archiving things and refuses to forget. The site continues to to incorporate a sand mandala approach. I never save these posts because it seems kind of counter-intuitive considering we’re talking about about the nature of morphing and vanishing content. I’m also trying out the WordPress app on the laptop instead of using the web browser. Every post is an experiement.
I don’t keep backups of my old blogs. Whenever I move it to a new hosting provider or change CMSes, give it a new design or anything that sort of involved updating it, maybe even changing the domain on occasion, I kind of let what was before just slip away. You can find older versions on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. I don’t think I’m really putting much out into the world that needs to be immortalised and the neat thing about digital is that it’s so transfigurable. We are not fixed creatures, and our ideas are not cemented in places. Minds are plastic.
I used to have a Facebook account. I had it for quite a while, about 15 years or so. I got rid of it sometime around 2016 or 2017 I think it was. At the time I attributed it to my disgust at whatever scandal was hitting Facebook then, there have been so many. But really, I was just done with it. Tired of all these connections. We’re supposed to lose touch with some people. It’s what makes it magic when you come across them again, or just have some vague memory of them. Humans can only deal with a few hundread people, roughly the amount that would have been in your free range nomadic tribe a few thousand years ago.
I digress.
One thing that I found to be a kind of interesting visual is this: People would update their Facebook profile photos, and those most recent photos would appear next to everything they’ve ever put on Facebook in the history of their account. I used to think FB should fix this. When you change your photo, the new one should just appear next to your newer content, creating the idea of a maturing, aging person next to an ever evolving stream of their content. If someone goes to your Facebook wall and scrolls down until they find the15-year-old version of you opining at length on the personal and emotional significance of a Marilyn Manson track, complete with the weird grammar and spelling choices of the time, it would be better if they saw the teenaged goth metal iteration of you instead of the version of that’s sitting across from them in the office. It’s visually suggesting that you’re still holding these views and ways of communicating even today. Maybe you are, but probably you aren’t.
There are parts of the internet that forget and parts that remember. I let those latter parts do the work for me and don’t worry too much about what it misses or what it retains. I deleted my Twtter account when it became X.com, basically holding out to just say that Elon didn’t run me off Twitter. I was there first, if anyone should have left it was him. But X.com was something different. A platform I never signed up for. On Twitter I had been using an app called Semiphemeral. It would go into the account and deleted old tweets, retweets, likes, etc. I had it removing anythign over 30 days old. When Elon turned off Twitter’s API spigot, that was one sign of the end. Presently on Mastodon.Social I have the account set to wipe anything older than 7 days, and over at Bluesky, when I remember to I use the Profile Cleaner to basically do the same thing albeit manually which is kind of annoying (I just did it again after writing this sentence).
I don’t have a real security concern for doing any of this. It’s the same reason I prefer to have disappearing messagtes in Signal, or other kinds of tools that allow for volatile file sharing. It’s more like natural conversation. Before digital was the norm, people talked in person or over a phone line. There was high entropy for every conversation. This isn’t about every thing, some records have different needs. You likely need a health record, there should be some tracking of taxes, etc. But Unless you’re a government official or the like doing work that needs to be kept in case it’s subject to an FOI request then you should have the right to be forgotten and the right to forget. You should have the right to put things down when you’re done with them.
