Alexandria

Daisy Alioto on grief and collective archiving.

In her November 30th piece “Crimes Against Search,” Dirt contributor Michelle Santiago Cortés wrote about the degradation of search engines, making it harder to find the stuff that we care about online. She included a call to action for all of us to become archivists ourselves: “Yes, we’re drifting, but maybe we can choose to float towards a more collective stewardship of the media we care about. As cliché as it sounds, even in the Tumblr days (or in the present work of Internet Archive or Rhizome), we relied mostly on each other to index by hashtagging, to preserve by downloading and reuploading.”

I edited it, I published it, I thought it was a wonderful, inspiring thought––but I wasn’t sure that it was true. And then my friend Anthony died. 

Anthony was a lot of things, some of which are captured in this obituary, others that could never be described only approximated by the number of his own jokes that were told at his funeral—leaving the room in tears of all kinds. But the most important thing for me to tell you about Anthony today is that he was very good at being online. His tweets were art. 

So when his friends got the news that he died, naturally they went to visit his Twitter page or Instagram only to realize that some time around November, for reasons that have nothing to do with his sudden death, Anthony had deactivated himself.

This, on top of the other grief, felt unimaginable. One friend compared it to the burning of Alexandria, speaking for all of us. I thought maybe if enough of us contributed our screenshots we could reconstitute at least some of what made his feed so great. Another friend pointed out that we could see some of his tweets on the Wayback Machine, which has long enabled the type of “collective stewardship” that Michelle Santiago Cortés talks about. 

And then a miracle happened. A real honest to god miracle. “about a year ago I was doing an analytics project and happened to save his tweets. reading them just now brought me a smile and a cry if anyone else's interested,” wrote Anthony’s friend Matt, with a link to a spreadsheet of his tweets. I clicked into the spreadsheet and could see at least 20 people in it already, all these anonymous animals. Among them, I felt like I understood what the internet was for again. Here are some of my favorites:

you got me wrapped around your fingies / do u have to let it lingies?

only God can judge me and only Clippy can counsel me!!!!!

a million dollars isn’t cool, you know what’s cool? cigarettes

We all say we’d eat at Remy the rat’s little restaurant but we all HATE the rat-sized cupcake chain

my sexual preference is "crab rangoon"

In my previous life (pre-Dirt) I was writing a cultural history of storage, before it became clear that running a company and writing a deeply researched non-fiction book are fundamentally incompatible. But of course I read a lot about Alexandria. Although the city’s founder and namesake, Alexander, was known for making war, the city became the envy of the world, not for its ability to conquer others, but to conquer minds. And a huge part of that advantage was gained through storage and preservation. 

Ironically, guarding Alexandria’s intellectual riches too jealously compounded the loss of the library. During Ptolemy III’s reign he decreed that any book that entered the port had to be seized to be copied. The copies were returned to the ships while the originals were kept in Alexandria. However, this did not go both ways. 

This policy nearly doomed the work of his ancestor Claudius Ptolemy whose cartographic text Geographia was the definitive understanding of the boundaries of the Roman empire during that era. Luckily, a copy of Geographia had been removed from the library and taken to Constantinople. It survived when the copies inside the Library of Alexandria were destroyed by fire or other, longer term failures of preservation. It goes without saying that Anthony’s tweets were my Geographia.  

At Anthony’s funeral, a QR code on the program led to a new website: www.anthonybriansmith.com. The website includes the scripts he wrote that were never produced, his recipes, a Spotify playlist made up of songs mentioned on his Twitter feed, and of course his tweets. The friends that made the website are calling it, “an ongoing collective project.” 

Michelle Santiago Cortés again: “I personally fantasize about building a media library that is more like a suite of tools than a collection of dead-end artifacts.” To quote a lyric used in one of Anthony’s favorite franchises (Shrek), now I’m a believer, too.

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• New Waxahatchee made me cry (YouTube)

• Meta’s plans for interoperability (The Verge) 

• What is Nowstalgia? (BBC)

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• “Mulch posts celebrate a body nourished by microplastics and synthetic food dye. The silty clay earth feeds us all.” Mulch posts explained. (TechCrunch)

• “Every book that finds you is a minor miracle.” Tajja Isen on book sales. (The Walrus) 

• “All told, the bulk of Wolfe’s writing is animated by a conviction that revolutions of style are also revolutions of substance…” Osita Nwanevu on Tom Wolfe (The New Republic) 

• I am fascinated by Matilda Djerf. (The Cut) 

• Plant water, posh pets. All the trends Snaxshot is tracking. (State of Snax)

• Mia Sato on how “Google shapes everything on the web.” (The Verge)

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