I've been listening to a lot of Lord Huron. Probably too much. Recently I became obsessed with the Southern Reach trilogy, now four books total with the new one. Lord Huron might be one of the most Area X-core bands because they do work as companions. I could put on "Time's Blur" on repeat through reading the entire first novel and it would probably sync up like those old urban legends about albums syncing up to movies. "Looking Back" seems to be from Old Jim's pov, and "What Do It Mean" could be the anthem of the series. Or "Not Dead Yet".
Anyway, because of this combination I've been thinking about death and decay probably more than I should be. Specifically the death of the internet and the decay of our online footprint. The path of our lives we weave through the world wide web is long and winding and strange. It can also be frozen in time, or placed in a sort of stasis.
Does anything truly die on the internet?
Last night I was on the Wayback Machine using an old "Dollzmaker" to well, make a doll. (If you'd like an example or to make one yourself, go ham.)
When I was in middle school aged (and high school, let's be honest), I used to spend way too much time on these Dollzmaker sites. I remember for a while my mother and I only had WebTV which didn't let you do much online. Think of a crappy Chromebook with your television as the monitor. You couldn't save files to a hard drive or download software. I remember begging users online to make me custom dollz in Photoshop, which I barely even knew what that was at the time.
I'd later graduate to using Photoshop, and getting a real computer, but I stayed obsessed with those dollz. I would stare zombified at the screen dragging and placing little assets to Frankenstein myself together. Killing my eyesight one pixel at a time.
Those little shiny bitches used to be my whole personality. They represented me as I couldn't be at the time, or how I thought I couldn't be. Pretty, sexy, wearing wild cool clothes. I was plain and too poor to ever get the sort of clothes I wanted.
The internet is like a living organism. Like the Crawler in Annihilation, it thinks and writes and records. I'm not talking about AI, more about the metaphorical idea of the world wide web. The terroir of it. Things would die forever if humans didn't keep cataloguing them, if we didn't invent things like the Wayback Machine to revive decaying web pages.
How much of the internet is in us, and us in the internet?
People talk about their online footprint all the time but I can feel mine like a tether. I don't think I've ever said anything too bad, mind. I most likely said dumb things out of ignorance. Probably some not so feminist speak? What i mean though when I say I feel it like a tether is pulling at me is somewhere along the web is a line from the first moment I logged onto a computer that leads up directly to my last breath. Isn't that fucking weird?
I hold so much nostalgia for the experience of searching for and making those Dollz. The memory is buried in my mind like mushrooms growing in the dirt. But somewhere deep in all that code is me, as well. I've found old flickr accounts, livejournal entries, cached webpages with my old childish usernames burrowed somewhere in the page text. I've changed the internet in small ways, and in ways more obviously and also imperceptibly, it's changed me.
Last night I burst into tears making one of these Dollz, thinking about how one day the only things left behind to prove I ever existed will be the ghost of me online. It was a random intrusive thought that hit me to my core. One day this little pixelated, inappropriately dressed icon will represent me somewhere when I'm not here anymore.
In the Southern Reach trilogy, doppelgängers and inconceivable monsters replace the dead. Nothing, floral nor fauna, every truly dies. It just shifts, and evolves.
In Lord Huron's new album, The Cosmic Selector v. 1, the narrator in the first song sings about "living outside of my body and mind". Is that what we're doing? Leaving behind memories, dreams and nightmares to keep us immortal?
There's something about the new album that has carried on from almost every other Lord Huron album, but in a good way. The theme of a lonely traveler who is forever looking for some mythical other half. "Is There Anybody Out There" says "i'm alone in this place, and i stare out into space, and i feel something strange, like my world has changed."
Just like Control, like Gloria, like the biologist and my technological footprint. Like Saul. Our histories change us, decay us, and become us.
