"A Place Where Nothing Counted or Lasted"

“A Place Where Nothing Counted or Lasted”

The title comes from an article I read today ostensibly about the waning popularity of Snapchat, a service I've never used. What the piece actually goes on to describe, however, is how social networks and websites in decline begin to resemble an older, more open Internet.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/18/17366528/snapchat-decline-internet-ghost-towns

The piece was full of lines like the one in the title—

Before the social internet had mapped so completely onto our social lives that attempting to separate the two or call life away from the internet “real” became a ridiculous endeavor, online was where we went to escape, to be unseen, to be nowhere.

What I loved about LiveJournal, in my early online days, was that it felt like a public space in which I got to talk to no one, a place where I could yell into the void. Putting any part of one’s self online is always a cry for attention to some degree, but sometimes, against all logic, the desire is just as much for the opposite. I want to confess things out loud and be ignored. I want to say the things I can only say if I believe that I am nowhere.

Online sociality may have addressed loneliness, but in its early form, it did as much to simultaneously heighten it, isolating those of us who sought out artificial social lives in two-dimensional typefaces. That uselessness was precisely the thing that the internet offered: this was a place you visited to get nothing done, a place where nothing counted or lasted with benefits or consequences.

Perhaps more than anything else, what has sucked all of the joy out of the social internet in its current form is its exhortation to be useful. [...] The public marketplace is everywhere. It’s an interactive and immersive CV, an archive. It all counts, and it all matters.

In this era of hyper-usefulness, what seems rarest and most valuable online are spaces that offer, however illusorily, a return to this original uselessness. There are places where, against the constant obligation to be seen and remembered, we might get to be unseen, unrecorded, and forgotten.

When websites become useless, they become a reminder of what was lost when the internet gained purpose, function, and profit.