Over the past year or so, it seems that the only times I ever use this journal is when somebody dies. This was brought home to me when a friend mentioned in an recent e-mail: "Are you ever going to blog on your site again? You know, about people who are alive?" My first reaction was defense -- well, isn't death the only thing worth writing a longform journal entry about? And then, the quick fishhook-in-the-mouth before the whole sentence came out... wait, that sounds exactly like something an old person would say. And I am old, internet-old. I've been on the World Wide Web for 17 years, longer than some very savvy young internet users have been real-life alive. And the rewards for that kind of longevity are similar to those given the real-life elderly: blank stares, indifference, on to the next one.
For the past day or two, I've had this feeling that the recent resurrection of Leslie Harpold's proto-webzine smug (1997-2000), by means of mirrored archive, should be a bigger deal somehow. Jason Kottke, a web aggregator who's been at it for 12 years and who makes money off his blog, pulled out the "get off my lawn" line, and well, there you go. I don't know if this is really like finding DaVinci sketches in your basement; to me it's more like rediscovering a stash of high school newspapers in the attic, and realizing that they're a lot more awesome than nearly everything since. We just didn't realize the full genius of it at the time. How could we have? We were all so young then.
Leslie Harpold died in December 2006 mysteriously, alone. They didn't find her for a few days, and it might have been longer if her readers hadn't noticed that she'd stopped updating her site. This would have been like any number of similar American deaths, but she'd written hundreds of thousands of words online and made friends all across the (far less crowded) World Wide Web. There were many remembrances on blogs and message boards in the days following. It seemed like everyone knew her.
Then, as months passed, she died again. The hosting plans for her websites expired. Her family (occasionally pictured in unflattering terms in her writings) refused to grant requests from her fans and friends to pay the account bills. They refused to allow republication; in time, the IP bindings for her domains loosened, dissolved and fell away. So most of what she wrote online simply vanished.
I've spent many of the last 24 hours going back through the issues of smug, reading Leslie Harpold's words from a website that I'd originally read in a web browser with a giant N and a starscape in the upper corner. Here are my favorites, far too many to fit in a tweet: midi rock, WWB(eck)D, content, bracket gesture, 80's server, kung fu girls, dumb search engines, SETI, "geek", american-style football, rock show etiquette, Paseo, fan fiction, q-tips, toasters, hackers, fansites, web logs, My Yahoo, Real Dolls, sexy jeans, The Knack vs. Foo Fighters, strangers' homepages, Prozac, techno, and the future.
Observational writing on the web can be funny and engaging on its own merits, without the need for a side-dish slab of hamfisted snark; it's easy to forget that sometimes. Much of the "magic" in her writing was nothing more than simple corner-brightening: it's amazing and wonderful what direct address, a tangential vignette, or a gently-placed note of kind respect for the readership can do. Leslie also kept a online journal that she called the Hoopla 500, an "experiment in text" that stored more personal memories and feelings in 500-word wedges. An incomplete portion of that project survives, thanks to the government, perhaps only because she wrote about living in New York City during and after 9/11. (Beautifully so.) Too many of those words are still gone.
I don't have a Leslie story of my own to share, like so many of the early bloggers do. I never wrote her an e-mail to say, "Hey, I really think the Hoopla 500 is great, here's a link to my home page, tell me what you think"... not because I feared a critical kebabizing, but rather because a non-reply would have crushed me. So mostly, I just took from her. I followed her example, because there were so few people to copy back then. I started my own text experiment nine years ago. I wrote a series of pieces on various topics, each with three 500-word panels (separated by triple-asterisks) that approached a chosen yet unlabeled subject from a different angle. I called it Intersection. In 2004, I tried grander scale: I fused memory, observation, travel and sport in a slow-education experiment that's just now coming together six years on.
At base level, Ms. Harpold's death and subsequent online disapparition is a lesson that the end comes twice to independent publishers on the internet. It also served as a clear warning that any of us who make periodic payments to a webhost absolutely must have a strong contingency plan. I'm lucky enough to have invisible friends who would be very upset if I died and my archives were wiped off the web (not the kind of upset that would last three years, though). But I also receive a fair amount of second-hand flak, and much of that is objection to the level of personal information I insert into my work. I've written about medical issues and family breakdowns and suicide fantasies. There's no real fearlessness in that, it's just how we internet-old people wrote "online journals" back then: honesty in complete paragraphs. I think the idea of complex digital personalities made out of "likes" and preferred consumer experiences is a more recent phenomenon.
I wonder if Leslie dealt with that any of that sort of critical crap about oversharing. I wonder if I'd have the digital balls to write her to ask about that, if she was still around today. I also wonder what she would think about the way the future turned out, about sacrificing privacy for a false sense of community, and what the smug column about Facebook would look like. And what about Twitter? Or Tumblr? Leslie, have you heard about this one?
Nowadays, bloggers become media superstars and get book deals and can even make good livings off their sites. The ones rewarded with big success are those who produce the most quality momentary content in service to their audiences, and spoiler alert, they're The News going forward. But I strongly believe that the online writers with legacies and lasting influence will always be the ones who are best at humanizing this web experience. The ones who put enough of their real selves out there so that their online fossil-fragments add up to complete, knowable, compelling people. They will be the ones who will be remembered, many years after they're gone, by people who didn't actually know them.
Leslie Harpold is why I number my season epilogues every year.
