In the Ruins of the Digital

[vershy versh]

The idea of digital wreckage is enticing me at the moment, both in @mvuent's sense of the artifacts and distortions inherent to certain gear and in the sense of the crumbling parts of the internet: the dead pages, the deleted tweets, the abandoned blogs. There's something compelling about the net having been around long enough to merit its own field of archaeology, gives me a similar feeling to Scientology establishing itself as a religion within a lot of people's lifetimes. The sense of a process you'd associate with the ancient taking place before your eyes. There are vast structures within individual Minecraft servers which people talk about like they're excavating an Egyptian tomb. The game's thirteen years old and already has its own storied history and buildings and monuments whose makers have been lost to time.

The virtual graveyard's something that's come up over and over in the stuff I've been reading lately too, not just in terms of abandoned spaces and structures but also actual graves and memorials hosted online. You've got the lingering web presence of the deceased too. A friend of mine died recently and his Soundcloud and various other profiles are all still up and likely won't come down unless the sites themselves do. We've a similar situation here with Mark's profile and the pinned/stickied thread.

This was a juicy bit of rubble I found a while back, made more pointed by the fact the blog itself's long abandoned:

Ghost Sites of the Web: Exploring the Ruins of Lehman.com

www.disobey.com

Lehman Brothers, at the domain lehman.com, is of course the giant investment bank that was allowed to fail, tipping the global financial system into chaos and collapse. The company is now in a state of bankruptcy, but its sprawling website appears much as it was before the end came.

Check out Lehman.com's History Timeline: it carefully records every detail of Lehman's existence but only through 2007. The site's Awards and Recognition page is another eerie area. Right up to the end of its existence, the firm appears to have been such accolades as "Best Credit Derivative House." Perhaps the ghostliest area of Lehman.com is its Careers page, where an invitation to "Begin Your Journey" and "Engage Your Passion" rotates undeterred by events. Similarly, the firm's Intellectual Capital section is months out of date.

Lehman.com has become unstuck in time, and while it's perhaps disingenous to expect that a lowly HTML coder would have been retained merely to update these sections, but the lack of closure is stunning.

 

[Clinamenic]

Very cool, also reminds of demoscene, which I just learned about a few days ago. People hacking old hardware to produce audiovisual art.

Demoscene - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The demoscene is an international computer art subculture focused on producing demos: self-contained, sometimes extremely small, computer programs that produce audiovisual presentations. The purpose of a demo is to show off programming, visual art, and musical skills. Demos and other demoscene productions (graphics, music, videos, games) are shared, voted on and released online at festivals known as demoparties.

The scene started with the home computer revolution of the early 1980s, and the subsequent advent of software cracking.[1] Crackers altered the code of computer games to remove copy protection, claiming credit by adding introduction screens of their own ("cracktros"). They soon started competing for the best visual presentation of these additions.[2] Through the making of intros and stand-alone demos, a new community eventually evolved, independent of the gaming[3]: 29–30  and software sharing scenes.

 

[vershy versh]

Very cool, also reminds of demoscene, which I just learned about a few days ago. People hacking old hardware to produce audiovisual art.

YouTube's full of Keygen music from back in the day.

 

[shakahislop]

wikitravel is a digital ruin. something that was useful for a bit where by this point everything that's on there was written in 2014

 

[dilbert1]

YouTube's full of Keygen music from back in the day.

Alway funny getting these when torrenting old cracked firmware, feeling the presence of the hacker through the fingerprint he insisted on leaving of his own hyper-online chicness (i.e. chiptune scorchers) and very grateful to him after it works

 

[vershy versh]

Did YouTube clips in 144 and 240p look bad at the time? You find someone's channel with uploads from twelve years ago and they're a blurry, pixelated mess. I can't remember whether they always looked like shit and that's just how it was or whether I thought they looked decent at one point. Anyway, the site's full of them. Traces of long dead phones. Stuttering memories.

Some of the older Dissensus threads are wrecked now too. Dead links, deleted photos, scrambled formatting due to forum updates. It's like finding the foundations of an older building under the current one, knocking a wall through and finding bits of the old wallpaper.

 

[dilbert1]

I'd be lying if I didn't get a little melancholic seeing that a video on youtube I find in any way endearing is 14 years old and probably belongs to an inactive account and will be haphazardly wiped off the web someday. I wonder how this concept relates to the idea of 'archive fever'

 

[vershy versh]

PKD's "kipple" has moved into cyberspace:

“Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more."

"No one can win against kipple," he said, "except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I've sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.”

He also has that line about the symbols of the divine showing up in our world at the trash stratum. Wonder what symbols are appearing out of the muck online, hidden in spam filters and obscure video uploads.

 

[vershy versh]

I'd be lying if I didn't get a little melancholic seeing that a video on youtube I find in any way endearing is 14 years old and probably belongs to an inactive account and will be haphazardly wiped off the web someday. I wonder how this concept relates to the idea of 'archive fever'

You've got bots and automods still running on dead sites and message boards, just sitting there waiting for someone to post again. I find it hard not to anthropomorphise them somewhat, even if they are just lines of code. Reminds me of the scene in I, Robot where they're going to execute one of the androids and the inventor does this speech over the top about ghosts in the machine and what constitutes a soul then it cuts to all the discarded earlier models and they're huddling together in the dark in shipping containers.




Still don't know whether it's true, but that story about someone leaving a bunch of bots running in Quake for years really captured the imagination.

'Quake III Arena' Bots Reportedly Stop Fighting After 4-Year Match

Can artificial intelligence discover the secret to world peace? Maybe video games can find an answer.

www.forbes.com

The story goes something like this:

A gamer sets up a bot-vs-bot match on his Quake III Arena server and lets the match run to see how the bots will adapt over a long period of time. The bot AI (artificial intelligence) in Quake III Arena is designed to adapt to new scenarios and situations but these are usually resolved in short matches.

So he starts up the match and then promptly forgets all about it---until four years later when he decides to login and see what's happening.

What he discovers is puzzling: the bots on both teams are simply standing still, not doing anything. The server is running and the game isn't frozen. The bots are simply standing there, not killing one another.

So this anonymous gamer downloads the game and logs into the server to see what happens when he enters the match.

Here things just keep getting stranger. When he enters, the bots don't fire on him---instead, they rotate to turn and look at him, and continue to look at him as he walks around the map.

Then he shoots one, and the bots attack him and before we can find out whether they then turn their weapons on one another, the server crashes.

 

[Clinamenic]

I'd be lying if I didn't get a little melancholic seeing that a video on youtube I find in any way endearing is 14 years old and probably belongs to an inactive account and will be haphazardly wiped off the web someday. I wonder how this concept relates to the idea of 'archive fever'

Yeah this sort of thing is why I'm so into archiving/preservation and whatnot. Stuff like Arweave/IPFS, the Internet Archive, etc.

 

[dilbert1]

You've got bots and automods still running on dead sites and message boards, just sitting there waiting for someone to post again. I find it hard not to anthropomorphise them somewhat, even if they are just lines of code. Reminds me of the scene in I, Robot where they're going to execute one of the androids and the inventor does this speech over the top about ghosts in the machine and what constitutes a soul then it cuts to all the discarded earlier models and they're huddling together in the dark in shipping containers.




Still don't know whether it's true, but that story about someone leaving a bunch of bots running in Quake for years really captured the imagination.

'Quake III Arena' Bots Reportedly Stop Fighting After 4-Year Match

Can artificial intelligence discover the secret to world peace? Maybe video games can find an answer.

www.forbes.com

I tend to believe its all human conceit, like feeling guilty for not playing with certain toys as if they felt the neglect, but it may be a salutary one in the end and not just mere naiveté or narcissism. I remember that scene in AI and being frustrated with Will Smith’s character’s contempt. Very similar heartstrings pulled in this scene

 

[shakahislop]

You've got bots and automods still running on dead sites and message boards, just sitting there waiting for someone to post again. I find it hard not to anthropomorphise them somewhat, even if they are just lines of code. Reminds me of the scene in I, Robot where they're going to execute one of the androids and the inventor does this speech over the top about ghosts in the machine and what constitutes a soul then it cuts to all the discarded earlier models and they're huddling together in the dark in shipping containers.




Still don't know whether it's true, but that story about someone leaving a bunch of bots running in Quake for years really captured the imagination.

'Quake III Arena' Bots Reportedly Stop Fighting After 4-Year Match

Can artificial intelligence discover the secret to world peace? Maybe video games can find an answer.

www.forbes.com

is this what woebot is doing with us

 

[vershy versh]

Yeah this sort of thing is why I'm so into archiving/preservation and whatnot. Stuff like Arweave/IPFS, the Internet Archive, etc.

The bloke interviewed in that Minecraft piece I've been banging on about was archiving structures from within the server due to how many of them were being destroyed by other users.

Now, instead of destroying bases, James is engaged in trying to save them, relocating them to The Vault. An archive of 2b2t's architectural history, restored and unaltered, right down to the dickbutts and Swastikas. One of the most common images we've seen on our trip is the flag of ISIS, a group known for destroying museums and historical sites. I can't help but see a parallel. Except wrecking things appears to be part of 2b2t's culture of anarchy. It hasn't got the calculation of Daesh.

[...]

The Vault is a hidden server he and some friends are putting together to preserve the bases and structures they find or create in 2b2t, before they are summarily destroyed. They download entire areas of the server and copy them to the Vault, fulfilling the role of archivists - a role you wouldn't normally expect on such a notorious server. He has also made a map of the server's wastelands to "share the history of spawn" and provide some basic help to new players, to help them escape spawn and "join the rest of us." By the end of our trip together I would come to think of James as an archaeologist of sorts. One of a small group of players who fights to save the creations of 2b2t, not destroy them. Although he admits he has done plenty of marauding in his time.

 

[vershy versh]

I'm seeing more and more blatantly AI-generated images during searches these days. You look up some celebrity and there are all these Francis Bacon-esque pictures of them popping up. There's supposedly some huge number of bots making up a decent chunk of internet traffic too. It's like walking through an overgrown garden at times, weeds sprouting all over the place.

 

[yyaldrin]

i feel like google search doesn't make sense anymore because there is no internet anymore, it's just a few big websites left so why bother searching. and if you do use it you'll just get a bunch of websites that will show you the same ai generated garbage text. the only way now to find something sometimes is to add "reddit" to your search query so that hopefully someone once asked or searched for the same thing on reddit and people commented on it.

 

[0bleak]

ai has become self-aware

 

[ghost]

i'm ready for Sloptimism

 

[Corpsey]

Meta's AI drive could kill off social media

Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, has revealed plans to deploy millions of AI-generated “users” across its platforms. By late 2025, this initiative could transform Facebook and Instagram into something more closely resembling Character.AI than traditional social networks. Meta...

unherd.com

It would be interesting if social media actually (relatively) died over the next 10 years. Maybe that's wishful thinking—in any case, it already doesn't seem like something you use to stay in touch with your actual friends (that's what whatsapp is for—maybe that's considered social media too?).

But a lot of ppl go on social media to interact with (and piss off) other people. What's going to be the fun in trolling if you're not sure if you're even trolling a real person?

 

[vershy versh]

Meta's AI drive could kill off social media

Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, has revealed plans to deploy millions of AI-generated “users” across its platforms. By late 2025, this initiative could transform Facebook and Instagram into something more closely resembling Character.AI than traditional social networks. Meta...

unherd.com

It would be interesting if social media actually (relatively) died over the next 10 years. Maybe that's wishful thinking—in any case, it already doesn't seem like something you use to stay in touch with your actual friends (that's what whatsapp is for—maybe that's considered social media too?).

But a lot of ppl go on social media to interact with (and piss off) other people. What's going to be the fun in trolling if you're not sure if you're even trolling a real person?

It makes it impossible to take anything at face value on larger sites. I was reading about this on Reddit and found myself wondering whether any of the comments lamenting the state of the web were themselves bots who'd learned how people speak about them.

 

[yyaldrin]

"Just watched John Wick 4, did a quick search to see if they are making a 5th one. This is the abysmal state of Google and the internet as we go into 2025."