Once, as a teenager, a friend and I ventured out in search of an abandoned mansion in the forest that we had heard rumour of in stories of urban exploration. We were given a route to follow, which took us on a narrow pathway that eventually gave way to a tree-circled meadow. In the center of this meadow was the most perfectly cinematic Victorian mansion we had ever seen.
Once we found an entrance, what we found surpassed our expectations. There were light beams filtering in through the unsettled dust illuminating a spiral staircase, wallpaper with miniature carousel horses, and gigantic windows overgrown with burgeoning green walls of ivy, shuttering us in and giving the whole environment a fertile green glow.
We were kids in a candy store. We were chickadees drunk off of poison red berries.
No corner was left unturned, we took photographs and slowly combed through each room to drink in the rich details.
Despite the joy and wonder found that day, there is something deeply melancholic about seeing a place of residence in such decay. It was haunted by the quiet promises that were made but not kept: well-crafted pieces of furniture that will never again be put to use; wallpaper peeling off a child’s bedroom that will no longer delight an inhabitant; and the house itself, an empty vessel no longer serving its purpose.
Much of the internet is haunted by obsolescence in the same way. Geocities websites stand like crumbling towers of a fallen city, texts and symbols still decipherable by the modern eye but beginning to be lost to time as well. Coming across a gif-filled personal website, with strikingly personal poetry laid bare for the world to see, and broken hyperlinks galore, feels like an archeological discovery. Sometimes only one home page will stand alone, all links broken and hallways crumbled in. Here, a slow and uneven decay takes the place of a clean and permanent death.
The internet is a haunted house; wandering its many rooms and halls, it becomes clear that it is a place where time is flattened and past selves linger on. To enter it is to enter an endless broadcast of the past, and to look into a mirror whose reflection lags slightly behind your own.
It is a poltergeist that follows you home in your pocket. It permeates the air itself through signals that are imperceptible to us, coursing through our lives via unseen wireless infrastructure and waiting to be tapped into like a digital spirit world.
Some haunted houses want to drive you away, but the haunted house of the internet does not want you to leave; your time and attention make up its lifeblood. In order to occupy your present, it will show you your past as well as offer up countless potential futures.
To come across a massive website dedicated to flash games that are no longer playable is like entering a vast graveyard, full of tributes to stories that are inaccessible forevermore.
Recently, I created an account on a horse-themed online game which was a favourite of mine as a young girl. Each of the servers that once teemed with players now stood empty or nearly so. The game was barely playable. I thought of worlds that disappear once interest has faded: the city in The Neverending Story, or anything passed down in oral tradition. The horse game has no such fate, at least until its owners choose to shut it down. It waits pristine and poised for players that may never arrive.
When logging on to social media, there are more ghosts to be considered.
Your profile picture from ten years ago might as well have been taken yesterday. There is no rot, nor sign of age. Do you feel tethered to it? Or, alternatively, does this ability to so easily craft identity online liberate you, if you can ignore all of the ghosts of past selves lingering just outside the door?
It is captured in time, indistinguishable from the present due to its immaculate preservation. Maybe there will be signifiers that date it: vignettes, filters, and watermarks from trends and software of days gone by. However, the ghost in a dated outfit is a ghost nonetheless: it presents itself in front of you in heavy antiquated attire, occupying space in the time period it does not belong to. Is this ghost invading the present, or are you invading the past?
The phrase “echo chamber” is used very often to describe insular social bubbles that form online, and the similar opinions recycled between all who take part in them. Here there is the illusion that the small world that they are a part of is reflective of the much larger one, when in actuality it may not be.
However, I think that the most prominent echo chamber in social media is the one between you and your past self. Your preferences are noted, and an amalgamation of all of your past selves and choices are reanimated. Whether it is something you clicked on a month ago or looked at thirty seconds ago, these iterations are recycled and fed back to you.
Years after exploring this abandoned mansion with my friend, we decided to take a nostalgic drive back to the location as adults. As we approached it, we were surprised to see that by chance, on the day we had selected to return to it, it was being demolished. We watched as an excavator tore through the walls we had traversed in youth. It was both disappointing and cathartic.
As time slowly tears apart old websites, broken link by broken link; as social media accounts of yore grow obsolete; as software no longer runs, as file formats no longer open… the ghosts of the internet move on, liberated from purpose.
Unless, downloaded and duplicated, shared and saved, reanimated by choice or cache, they may appear once again: a ghostly revenant burnt into the screen.