To have any experience with the internet is to know that there has been no greater lie told (mostly by accident) than “the internet is forever” (or it’s popular variant, “if you put that on the internet, it is there forever”). That was always what I was told when I was young. It’s what many of my friends were told. “Be careful with what you put on the internet! There’s no such thing as completely taking it down!” Nowadays, we know better. For things to exist on the internet, they have to be stored somewhere and digital storage is not as eternal as we were led to believe. Servers go down, backups get deleted, “AI” agents delete entire environments and then back that nothing up over the backups, and sometimes Amazon just deletes your account and all it’s digital licenses for no reason with no chance of recovery. Digital ownership is ephemeral and while nothing truly lasts forever, the half-life of things on the internet might be much shorter than everyone was led to believe. And sure, just because you can’t find it doesn’t mean it’s actually gone. There’s so much data tucked away in advertising companies, various archival efforts, and forgotten, dusty hard drives in some abandonded warehouse or server rack, so it’s difficult to tell when something is truly gone forever (like a video game I played via SNES emulator that I cannot find any mention or record of anywhere that I keep thinking is Secrets Of Mana but learn it isn’t when I go play SoM). I’m sure this game from my late childhood/early double-digit-years exists somewhere and I’m sure the version I remember is some modified ROM or a translated version of a game and that it is sitting tucked away on someone’s computer somewhere, forever out of my reach other than the few hazy memories of it I hold onto.

The reason I’ve been thinking about this, though, is because the actual impermanence of the digital world and the way people talked about it originally kind of reminds me of the way that my parents talked about sins (specifically, sins in the Catholic sense of the concept). That, combined with an interesting bit of information about how humanity responds to technology, has me drawing a parallel I didn’t really expect. You see, according to this person (I have desperately tried to find the thread, but I can’t even remember who posted it on bluesky) and their sources, humans have been likening the latest technology to the human mind for a long time. It is an easy-to-grasp image, since it has to do with information storage most often or the way people conceive of things and just about all of humanity is familiar with the concept of remembering things. Plus, comparing old records or photographs or whatever to memories has been a common and often poignant metaphor for the way that they tend to fade with time. So when my parents taught me, as a child, that exposure to sinful things was bad because it corrupted you permanently, allowing you to call those images to mind any time and often springing them upon you unaware (and thus creating a new sin on your soul all over again because you saw the sinful thing once again (which is also a great example of why I’m messed up in the specific ways that I am, too)), it wound up resonating with the ideas they eventually tried to teach me about not sharing things on the internet. So now, as the true imperanence of the internet comes to mind, I find myself thinking back through all of that again.

After all, memories fade. There are somethings, most of them trauma-adjacent, that still spring to mind with crystal clarity, but it is fewer than before. Processing my trauma has helped the edges and details of those moments to fade. Some memories have faded to the point that I reconstruct them as some kind of half-third-person scene in my mind, using pieces I remember more clearly. That said, most of it will snap into clear focus and full detail again with the right prompt. A mental image that builds the scene around it or the things that sprang to mind when my parents told me that viewing sinful things taints you for life or a particular feeling across my shoulders or even just the right smell. It unlocks the thing you thought you’d forgot just like stumbling over a rare blog that has the exactly perfect screenshots of a game you followed down a rabbit hole thanks to adding in extra keywords now that the internet is shitty, suddenly giving you a brand new candidate to check out that has all of the overworld combat animations you remember. All it takes is the one right bit of information and then there it is again, fresh and sharp enough to cut yourself if you’re not careful. I mean, this isn’t true of everything of course. I doubt I will ever remember exactly what scene I saw that made my parents send me out of the room briefly while they viewed the rest of the episode off the CIS (a broadcast TV show) DVD I’d rented from the video store before telling me I couldn’t continue watching it and how I’d need to go to confession every time I thought of whatever it was I saw thanks to that exposure. It was probably a woman in a bra or something. Maybe some people making out and then falling onto a bed. All I remember at this point is the lecture and that it had to do with some incredibly tame “sexual” content.

It does not escape me that the people who lectured me so often about the permanence of sin and information on the internet so deeply forgotten their own failings and can no longer find me on the internet. Because that’s the other side of all of this. You can forget or delete things. It’s difficult, but still possible to delete things off the internet. It is also only a matter of time before you forget most things and a little extra effort certainly speeds up that process. I mean, I certainly can’t remember how my parents looked the last time I spoke to them face-to-face. I didn’t want to remember it, so I did not pay close attention. And I’ve worked very hard for years to create a clean break between the digital persona of the person they raised and who lived in their house and the person writing this blog post. There is no longer any connection between the two, even in advertising data (so far as I’ve been able to find and I’ve done quite a bit of looking), so even if my parents tried to find me that way, they wouldn’t be able to get access to anything connecting that version of myself to any of my recent addresses. I didn’t actually do this intentionally, mind you, I just wanted to mess with the data that the internet has assigned to the digital entity that is Me On The Internet. It was worth the effort though, even if I didn’t intend for it to play out this way, since I’m certainly enjoying that benefit these days. So much of what we once thought was permanent and irrevocable actually just needs the right attention (or lack of it) to vanish permanently and while I do enjoy the mental exercise of thinking about it, I’m really not sure how I feel knowing that, one day, all of my writing will be gone. All years and years of this blog will disappear entirely when hard drives corrupt, servers go offline, and backups are deleted to make room for new paying customers. It’s kind of nice, though, since that means I’m not as stuck to the details of my past as I felt I was for so very long.