Will You Leave a Light On?
On memory, ownership, and the things that disappear without leaving ruins
The internet never forgets—or so we were told.
In February 2006, it forgot me.
There is an archaeology of the early internet, or at least there ought to be.
GeoCities neighbourhoods. LiveJournal communities. Myspace pages assembled from music, glittering backgrounds and questionable design choices. Forums where familiar usernames gradually became people you felt you knew.
These were not merely websites.
They were places.
Some were demolished. Some were abandoned. Others remain only as altered versions of themselves, the buildings still standing after everyone who made them matter has gone elsewhere.
I had a journal on Diary-X, and so did my friends.
We recorded years of ourselves there: thoughts we might not have said aloud, conversations preserved in comments, relationships, arguments, bad poetry and ordinary days that seemed too unimportant to remember because we assumed they had already been recorded.
Then a hard drive failed.
The available backup preserved some of the machinery of the site, but not the lives stored within it. Around 120,000 journals disappeared: entries, comments, images and accounts erased almost overnight.
Diary-X forgot us all at once.
Digging through the digital dirt now, there are no strata.
No layers from which to reconstruct what stood there. No fragments caught beneath later settlements. No discoloured earth marking the outline of a vanished wall.
I lived through every era of it. I was there when it was written.
Yet all that remains is the memory of those of us who were there.
And memory fades all the same.
I found myself thinking about this recently at a medieval festival in Tomar.
For a few days, the town wrapped itself in an older version of itself. Banners hung from windows. Knights walked the streets. People dressed in linen and leather sold crafts, cooked over fires and performed a memory of a time none of them had known.
The ancient was remembered, recycled and relived in celebration of the town’s Templar history.
Standing among it all, I was struck by the contrast.
Centuries of history had been preserved in stone, record and ritual, while parts of the digital world in which I had actually lived had simply disappeared.
The old advice is to take only memories and leave only footprints.
But as digital denizens, I wonder whether we somehow managed the opposite.
We left the memories, and the footprints were taken.
The internet’s supposed permanence was usually offered as a warning. Be careful what you post. An embarrassing photograph, a careless sentence, some youthful indiscretion: once placed online, it would follow you forever.
Yet the internet has developed a strangely selective memory.
It remembers what we bought, where we went and which links we followed. It remembers enough to advertise to us. Somewhere, perhaps, there is still a record of the browser I used, the pages I visited and the adverts I ignored.
The things we wanted it to remember proved rather less permanent.
Perhaps we confused storage with preservation.
For a while, they look much the same. Both involve putting something somewhere and expecting it to remain there.
But digital storage requires an unbroken chain of small acts of maintenance.
Hard drives must be replaced. Backups must be tested. Domains must be renewed. Formats must remain readable. Software must be patched and carried forward onto hardware that did not exist when it was written.
Stone weathers visibly.
Digital things decay without appearing to age at all.
A castle has to survive war, weather, neglect and centuries of changing politics before it disappears.
A website can vanish because someone stopped paying twelve pounds a year for its domain.
Video games make the problem harder still.
They are one of our newest art forms, but among the most fragile. A painting can hang on a wall. A book can be printed again. A film can, at least in principle, be projected from a surviving reel.
A game may require a particular console, an obsolete operating system, a licence server, an online service or a community of other players. Preserve the files and you may still have preserved only the pieces, not the experience.
Sometimes games are lost accidentally.
Sometimes commercially.
Sometimes intentionally.
Servers close. Digital shops disappear. Licences expire. Updates overwrite earlier versions. Music is removed because rights changed hands. A game someone paid for becomes something they are no longer permitted to download or play.
Nothing has been destroyed in the traditional sense.
It is simply no longer there.
We have become a society that owns remarkably little of its culture.
We rent it.
Films, music, books, games and software arrive through subscriptions to libraries no individual could ever reasonably have owned. For roughly the price of a single DVD, I can watch more films in a month than a previous generation might have collected in a lifetime.
That is not nothing.
Access has been democratised in a way that would have seemed miraculous when I was younger. Almost any song I remember is seconds away. I can carry a library in my pocket and stumble across films, books and games I would never have encountered on a physical shelf.
But access and ownership are not interchangeable.
The shelf is not ours.
Someone else decides what stands upon it.
A film disappears because a licence expires. A song is replaced with a different recording. A game is patched until the thing people first experienced no longer exists. A book is revised.
Often there is no announcement.
There is just an empty shelf.
Some Warner Bros. releases of its older cartoons began with a warning. The cartoons contained racial and ethnic stereotypes. Those depictions were wrong then and remain wrong now, but the works were being shown as originally created because editing them would risk pretending those prejudices had never existed.
That was a choice.
In my view, the correct one.
The artefact remained, but its context changed.
Preserving something is not the same as endorsing it.
A library does not agree with every book on its shelves. A museum does not approve of every object in its collection. A battlefield is not preserved because war is good.
Sometimes we preserve something precisely because we reject what it represents.
Some things must remain so that we cannot pretend they never happened.
Disney made a different choice with Song of the South.
The film’s depiction of race and its romanticised vision of the post-Civil War American South are not simply products of an innocent age now being misunderstood. They deserve criticism. They deserve context.
Disney has instead chosen not to make the film available through its modern streaming catalogue.
Perhaps that feels safer.
But criticism and disappearance are not the only choices available to us.
Preservation is easiest to defend when the objection to a work is mistaken. Its real test comes when the objection is justified.
We should not preserve every work because everything within it deserves celebration. Sometimes we preserve a work because it shows us something we would never choose to make again.
Old physical copies of Song of the South still survive, including home-video releases sold outside the United States. They remain in private collections, beyond the reach of a digital catalogue that has chosen not to include the film.
A streaming service can empty its shelf.
It cannot recall every copy we once owned.
That physical stubbornness matters.
For years, Dogma was extraordinarily difficult to watch legally. Not because it had been banned or judged too dangerous, but because of the peculiar ownership and distribution arrangements surrounding it.
The reason was different.
The result was identical.
You searched for it, and it was not there.
From the outside, censorship, neglect, licensing disputes, failed migrations and commercial indifference all produce the same empty shelf.
The catalogue rarely tells us which one we are looking at.
The search box has no footnotes.
That may be the most unsettling part of digital disappearance.
A burned book leaves ashes. A demolished statue leaves an empty plinth. An erased name may leave scratches in the stone where its letters once were.
Digital absence can leave nothing.
Imagine, quietly and without announcement, that Nineteen Eighty-Four was no longer available.
Or V for Vendetta.
Or Fahrenheit 451.
Not banned. No public bonfire. No controversy around which people might gather. No declaration to resist.
Just gone.
The most effective censorship may not be the work we are forbidden to read, but the work we are never told has disappeared.
Yet malice is not required.
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence, as the saying goes. We might add expired contracts, abandoned systems, indifferent owners and unfavourable cost-benefit analyses to the list.
Culture does not need to be deliberately suppressed to be lost.
It merely has to become inconvenient to maintain.
The analogue world understood this problem.
In Britain, published works are subject to legal deposit. Copies pass into the custody of the British Library and the other deposit libraries so that the published record can be preserved.
The United States has a comparable system, with published works deposited through the Copyright Office for the use of the Library of Congress.
The mechanisms differ, but the principle is striking:
Publication creates an obligation to the future.
We did not trust publishers to remain interested forever. We did not assume that every work would remain fashionable or commercially useful. We did not preserve only the things with which we agreed.
A copy passed into other hands.
There was deliberately an artefact beyond the continuing control of its creator or publisher. A company could fail. A title could fall out of fashion. An author could reconsider what they had written.
Still, the copy remained.
Legal deposit gave printed work some of the stubbornness of stone.
It could sit unread for decades, waiting for someone to discover it, reassess it or disagree with it all over again.
Digital culture often has no such independence.
The same organisation may be publisher, distributor, bookseller, shelf and librarian. What we call ownership may be no more than permission to access a work while the arrangement remains technically, commercially and politically convenient.
The definitive copy remains elsewhere.
The control remains elsewhere.
The memory remains only while someone chooses to keep the lights on.
Tomar survives because people keep showing up.
Someone repairs the stone. Someone preserves the records. Someone makes the costumes, hangs the banners and tells the stories again.
The festival is not proof that history preserves itself.
It is proof of continued custodianship.
The internet assumed that remembering would happen automatically.
It does not.
History survives because, generation after generation, somebody decides it is worth carrying forward. Not untouched. Not uncriticised. Not necessarily celebrated.
But preserved long enough to be reconsidered.
The stone remains.
The digital world waits for the next renewal notice.
We left the memories, and the footprints were taken.
Don’t forget to turn off the lights when we’re gone.
Coda
Only after writing this did I think to look for what had lived at mentalblock.net before me.
The earliest surviving captures, from the beginning of the 2000s, already show a parked domain. That already is tantalising. It suggests there may have been something here before the archive arrived: a site now entirely lost, save perhaps in the memories of those who made it or happened to pass through.
From around 2009, the trail becomes clearer. The domain was home to Mental Block, an experimental art project by Sofy Yuditskaya, Eric Mika and Arturo Vidich. They hacked consumer EEG headsets and turned the electrical activity of the mind into performance. By about 2014, the project had ended; what followed was another decade of parked pages and digital silence before the domain eventually found its way to me.
I know even this much because the Wayback Machine remembered.
There is something wonderfully fitting in that. A site once built to read the activity of the mind is now a place where I write down some of mine. Two entirely separate thoughts, divided by a long pause, sharing the same address.
My thanks to the people behind the Internet Archive, who left a light on here, as they have for so many places otherwise lost to time.
A thought in return?
If this wandering led your thinking somewhere unexpected, I would enjoy hearing where.
mental@mentalblock.net