ephemeral plaintext

heartfelt posts lost in time like tears in rain

This was originally written in Substack Notes, but it sorta kept going, and I thought I’d just publish it as a standalone post instead.

✱

I think I’m beginning to get a sense for what I want to use these ‘substack notes’ for. When I first learned about it, it seemed like a pointless add-on to the platform. And maybe it is, actually, and maybe I can work with that.

I like to believe in that principle of creativity that everything that seems useless can actually be useful in some other context. Take for example glue that happens to not be very sticky. What’s the point of that? It seems like a failure by-definition, since glue is supposed to be sticky. That’s until you realize that you can use them to make Post-Its, which are a billion dollar industry. What is useless in one frame can be useful in another! Maybe there’s something in your own life that’s frustrating you mainly because you’re looking at it through the wrong frame? Boom, just did a Frame Studies. ▣

(Lucas Jackson, 2016)

Now I’ll subject you to some ranting about some of the history of the context of my writing habits.

“On April 19th, I made bread” – 2000 year old graffiti from Pompeii

One of my earliest consistent writing habits was to write on my personal blog. I was a teenager at the time, and I had several other friends who also blogged, and we’d all follow and comment on each other’s blogs. Most of what we wrote was mundane and ephemeral. “Today after school, B and C and I went to D’s house. We played video games. It was very fun and silly. <I will now describe the funniest thing that happened in great detail>. Then we had Mcdonalds for dinner. Mom was mad that I got home late. Additionally, I’m going to get in trouble tomorrow for not having done my homework. Life is great and also terrible.”

In the earliest days, people would use different platforms like blogger, diaryland, diary-x, xanga, livejournal and so on. I used diary-x, I think because it had both the coolest name and I liked something about the interface and how you could use different themes for different posts. Sadly, diary-x was run by one guy with a single server, and when that server had hardware problems, all of our blogs were irretrievably wiped out. It was a great personal tragedy for me that I’m still grieving as an adult. I probably always will. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that most of my writing since has been a ritual of remembrance, words assembled in honor of what has been lost.

After a period of shock and mourning I then moved most of my near-daily feelsposting to livejournal, and I also had a personal wordpress blog which started to get “more professional”, in that I’d rant about news and politics rather than just my personal life. That wordpress blog lives on today on my visakanv.com domain, though I’ve migrated a bunch of it to my archives (which is just another wordpress blog, with more mess). I also had a tumblr, where I also developed a cluster of oddball friends whom I knew only by their handles and their most intimate secrets, and I’d say that was mostly about sharing aesthetics, jokes, memes and so on…

[[…Trying to tell the story about these things is actually a tricky technical challenge, because there are so many specific details that get muddied up in memory. The precise patterns of how I used each platform and what my relationships with people were on them and how they evolved over time are remarkably intricate. It would take a lot of time and effort to attempt to represent them faithfully, and I’m not convinced it would be particularly interesting or relevant to anybody other than myself. Well— as I say this, I’m reminded that interestingness and relevance is very difficult to predict in advance. But the higher law here is for the writer (that’s me) to write what is compelling to them in the moment, and what I really wanted to say here is…]]

At some point I started posting status updates on Facebook. The earliest forms of Facebook statuses had us writing in 3rd person. The interface would include your name in it, with the “is” attached, so you might write something like “having a burrito”, and it would appear on the timeline as “Visakan Veerasamy is having a burrito”. The early Facebook timeline was a strange thing, and the evolution of that is itself something that an entire post could be written about. We didn’t really have much of a clue about what we were in for. We thought we were signing up to see photos of our friends, we didn’t realize we were simultaneously signing up for political arguments. Nevertheless, I started posting statuses more often, and it was nice to get responses from my friends. And this seemed to coincide with a general decline in posting on blogs (RIP Google Reader etc). I remember there was a time where I’d check on my bookmarked blogs to see who updated what, and somehow that habit decayed over time. I think part of it was that people started to update their blogs less, too. It might have been some sort of vicious cycle. (I went to look up what people think about this. There seems to be a general consensus that ‘the blogosphere’ started in the late 90s and ‘died’ around 2010. Google Reader was killed in 2013…)

And then eventually Facebook too started to seem like it was going through a general decline in thoughtful posting and commenting, maybe because everyone’s parents starting signing up, maybe because we were getting fatigued with how it started feeling like the tedious ordinary world we had originally logged on to get away from. Most of the action now seems to be happening in ‘groups’, which is interesting to me because many of these some barrier to entry, but not much. Yet it shifts the norms away somewhat from “completely open space where anybody can say anything and nobody has to be responsible for anything”. And maybe that’s good, because people do seem to behave better in such contexts. Or maybe it’s just marginally less accessible to people who are inclined to behave badly.

Personally, I ‘migrated’ most of my thoughtful posting to Twitter around 2015 or so. And on Twitter too, every so often you see people silently deactivate or stop posting, and every so often there are cries of mourning about how things were better before. And they’re often right in some sense. The game is always changing, and not always for the better. Although sometimes it’s different in ways that allow for an entirely new kind of better than what we had been accustomed to. Take the doubling of the 140 character limit, and the introduction of threads and quote-tweets. Each of those things changed the vibe, and each of those things have been misused by some users. But creative users always find a way to take each new affordance and make something artful out of it. I’ve always believed in art and artists, even in the worst of conditions, so a part of me always remains optimistic that there will be something that inspires, something worth celebrating.

It seems like a lot of the people I knew growing up who used to blog switched to posting Instagram stories, which is comparatively ephemeral, lets you stay in touch with your friends. It’s that or small-ish groupchats. It makes me a little sad how many of the people I used to be ‘actively online with’ aren’t very active anymore, their profile pictures stuck in 2013 or so, maybe with a wedding photo here, a baby photo there. Sometimes I get a little angry even, or disappointed maybe, at old friends who abandoned their grand dreams about helping to bring forth a better class of discourse in the world. But I’ve come to see that that’s the way of things. Most people simply aren’t serious when they make such grand proclamations. The task for those of us who are, or who try to be, is to focus on finding and appreciating and encouraging the others who are also serious. After all, fussing and moan too much about other people being unserious is itself an unserious act.

I don’t quite know the specifics of how the next generation of online kids are growing up differently. I keep an eye on tiktok out of curiosity, and as with everything of that nature, there’s obviously both good and bad parts to it, and the good parts are always run by underappreciated volunteers. But it feels a little early to say how it’ll all play out. I do believe that there will always be people who care about longform plaintext. I still see kids reading books, which always gladdens my heart. But maybe longform plaintext is going the way of rock music. I think it’ll always be around, but I’m not sure it’ll ever be at the forefront of mainstream culture the way it once was.

And maybe that’s fine, actually. Maybe we can work with that.