#media#essay#software#technology soft tech
Link: https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/i-know-a-place-pipkin?utm_source=pocket_mylist
A reflective, investigative piece on abandoned physical worlds and their digital analogs and how much meaning can become ascribed to something so uncared for.
Quotes
Even now, being online is to watch history accumulate in real time. Every timeline suggests a timeline of yesterday, or of the day before yesterday, all stacked in layers and stored neatly in a server farm somewhere until that particular service collapses under the weight, subjecting internet historians to a panicked flurry of attempted archival activity before all records disappear into screenshots and fuzzy memories.
I thought about my favorite memories of parties in online spaces, which were always baroque affairs held in some out-of-bounds area—say, clipped through the floor in World of Warcraft with the inside-out meshes forming an impossible architecture as we spammed the dance emote. How these were also cement slabs, in a way: no cops, be loud; outside, stars; inside, house footprint; you can take your shoes off without getting bit by ants.
To stand in these places is to stand in a place where desire was met. Where for a moment, something that was yours was carved out of the ugly body of online corporate games culture. Like building a fort in the woods between the highway and the mall.
But if the money runs out, what then? How long does a cement slab in the woods at night (with 0 visits, 0 players, 0 favorites) stay online? If it disappears, would anyone notice? Would anyone care? Would I find somewhere else to stand at three in the morning and feel the roundness of the world?
There is no sign we were ever there; our presence was scrubbed away well before the lots became Trulio listings. That summer lives on only through the fog of my fondness. The woods themselves are now lawn.
But even so, on one of those cement slabs—now under several layers of paint, adhesive, and tasteful Saltillo tiles—I wrote my name.
In this archive of actions, I want to perform action. I become grateful to wake up every day knowing how I will spend it. I’m not building a cathedral, but I think about what building a cathedral would let me do, how it would allow me to move my hands in a task and see something monumental grow very slowly, with immense care. A bricklayer understands brick in a way that is devotional.