The Transience of the Digital Life

The 27th of August, 2024

Online life is turbulent. Much more chaotic than the real world. Websites, servers, apps, games, and friends come and go. It’s like a flowing river. Being online grants you anonymity as well; there's nothing stopping you from simply changing your name, using different sites, and leaving your entire digital life behind for another.

Thinking, as a 30-year-old, of all the social sites and services I’ve used over the years online and how many of those are gone now is kind of staggering. Sometimes I still think of Leon; we met on Runescape in 2007 and would play all the time together. I remember sitting at my grandma's Windows XP computer playing with him; we went deep into the wilderness together and encountered a group of player killers, and he sacrificed himself to buy me time to run away. I'll never forget those moments we shared, but after logging off one summer day in 2008, he was just gone from my life forever. That's just how online relationships can be. I find myself sometimes going through old screenshots and seeing friends I used to talk to online with no idea of how to reach them now. It’s all kind of sad!

But there is permanence too

Of course, this type of short-term relationship that exists with sites, servers, and accounts doesn’t have to also exist with humans. I’ve been hanging out with some friends I met on IRC in 2015 for 9 years now, and we still talk daily. I think there is great value in this too. Sometimes I think too about friends I’ve known on fedi for many years and how they’ve changed over time. I think the internet granting us all windows into each other’s lives, even though we are separated by great amounts of space in the real world, is really valuable, but because of the great amount of space between us, it’s also easy to drift apart.

Barring great services like the Internet Archive, all of this stuff could be gone tomorrow. All of it is so close to being a memory.

Because everything is moving so fast, you’ll meet many people in your travels on the wild wild web. Lots of mean people, lots of nice people. Very rarely you’ll meet someone special; someone who just clicks with you magically, someone who talking to is just pure bliss, someone who is always saying the right thing, someone you can always say the right thing to.

Make sure those people don’t fall through the cracks of this transient world!

But for all my lamenting, I think there is inherent value in this transience too.

Let’s enjoy this short time together.