The things we don’t remember. Last week, in an effort to combat spam, Google announced the company will begin deleting inactive accounts as early as December. Targets include everything from Gmail and Drive, with untold troves of private data, to YouTube and Blogger, with countless public posts comprising entire chapters of our recent history. There’s no nit here on the policy. It’s the company’s prerogative to do what it will, and for whatever reason it deems fit. But today it’s clear that everything we do online is temporary, not permanent, and it can’t be overstated how different that is from what we all expected in the early 2000s, back when our entire civilization was trading analog for digital. Then, as Millennials entered their teenage years, our parents’ fear was what we did online would live forever. But in 2023 our generation is in no great danger of remembering embarrassing photos from college shared on Facebook. We’re in danger of forgetting — not only those moments, but everything that ever lived exclusively online. Today, that includes almost everything. 

In 2009, Yahoo shut down GeoCities, an early entrant in the space of online “neighborhoods” now totally lost to time, a kind of fading that would have taken centuries in our prior human age of paper bound in leather. The overlapping worlds constructed on GeoCities comprised a significant record of our early online history: not a subculture, but a world of subcultures. On MySpace, an untold number of accounts were purged, not only from existence but from memory. Many of you have probably never heard of Xanga, but my high school friends and I erected an elaborate shared world on that platform as we kept in touch from college — photos, illustrations, essays, and a robust, lively comment section on every one of our personal blogs. The dramas born of our digital community were real. Friendships grew, several actually ended. The entire record is gone.

Just a handful of years ago, Club Penguin was a popular massively multiplayer online game. In 2017, it was abruptly nuked (a wild old story worth your time, for what it’s worth), and a small, unique society was reduced to less than dust.