(dated now, but still fun I think)
In this short click-through RPG, I wanted to examine two anxieties brought on by the capacity and slipperyness of digital memory: being hopelessly lost in our archives, and of losing our archives entirely. Personally, I used to call this feeling ‘infinity anxiety’, in which libraries, the pile of journals under my bed, and the massive digital archives of my stored photos gave me a dizzying feeling of !!?!?!?!? Now I recognize it as a byproduct of the attention economy, in which a wealth of information available is not a good thing – a limitless ocean to explore and create within – but instead turns attention into an exploitable resource. Private archives become daunting, because how are you ever going to find the time to look back through them? Or why create anything under these conditions at all?
The two sites visited are internet cable beds and data bunkers, since they can both be read as liminal sites of the digital. They exist physically (and with great mass) but host and transmit our digital content seamlessly in the abstract spaces of the internet or ‘the cloud’. Just how we host elements of our ‘real’ selves, memories, and lives on ‘fake’ platforms, folders, and servers, I wanted these viruses to appear tangibly (in organic, buggy forms) to the user while representing, or perhaps coming from, their intangible digital worlds. I felt these sites would be fitting homes for such digital memory viruses as well as imply a hybridity of memory.
For the internet cable monster, the user is taken to the bottom of the ocean, somewhere which calls back to the primordial soup of creation. In this context, the fear of returning to such an ocean and fearing the limitlessness of the internet are converged, and so this is where the cable virus appears. Our desire to control and format vestiges of our memories and knowledge is in many ways a resistance to abjection –– to being formless and squeamishly enmeshed with everything else. The organization and guarding of our files is daunting because it can only ever be a negotiated process. We can never keep track of or format our entire selves, our brains aren’t computers, and eventually we’ll rot back into the pulse of all else. It could be relaxing to let go of this anxiety, to drift with waves that suit us instead of frantically grabbing at every current. So, after the user encounters the virus, one outcome poses the loss of digital archives (as well as the impetus to archive at all) as something calming. ‘Always too much’ can be a comfort if you don’t have to look at it all.
In contrast, the data bunker hard drive monster asks how comfortable we could ever be holding onto all of those files, perhaps indefinitely. Limitless record –– as the digital seems to promise many of us –– is always and has always been precarious. Whether our hosted content doesn’t survive a server’s update or our laptop doesn’t survive our morning coffee, that promise was always conditional on being able to maintain a weather controlled host for digital archives –– the data bunker itself. This iteration of the virus absolves memory of that anxiety but (for me at least) also presents a more ominous outcome, if not more sublime. There’s a certainty in perfect memory alleged to the digital that doesn’t feel like it belongs to organic life.
For inspiration, I looked at Tung-Hui Hu’s essay on Data Centers and Data Bunkers, as well as chapter six from Nicole Starosielski’s book The Undersea Network
I hope that this play-through eases any digital memory anxieties you might have