At least the comment sections.
Consider the case of legendary blogger Jon Swift (Al Weisel) who passed away in March of last year.
His lacerating, Badlands-dry wit is sorely missed by the entire Left blogosphere. What salts that wound unnecessarily is the fact that he died digitally intestate (so to speak) with his comment section open, and as time has passed and the "we'll miss you" comments tapered off, the place began filling up with this...
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And buried in the middle of it, this:
12/10/2010 12:58 AM
tigtog said...
I absolutely HATE seeing all these spam comments left as updates here on this post. Isn't there any way for somebody to look through his computer and find out his login details? Or any way for the family to contact Google and have the blog assigned to one of them so that they can enable moderation and delete all the spam?
It's heartbreaking to see Jon's legacy come to this.
This slow, silent accretion of small desecrations by mindless, life-mimicking devices is a genuinely new and sad thing: an army of automatons quietly overrunning some of the sites of our departed like something out of a Ray Bradbury short story.
I wrote about it here in 2005 --
The side-effects of a digital world-- and it still unnerves me.
...
And I would drop by once in a great while and read the new posts. The sexual particulars were very much not my cuppa joe, but the writing was always good…until it veered sharply into despair. And then writing about life being painful and not worth the trouble appeared.
Then a rally.
And then the site “went dark”, and there have been no new posts since.
Ok, perhaps they just got bored or busy. Perhaps they changed their lives. Perhaps to move on they had to shed old haunts and habits like a skin. But I really don’t think so.
Now I wouldn’t have known this person had we passed on the street, and it’s highly unlikely we ever would have crossed paths in the analog world, but I came to admire their voice and while I have no way of knowing what actually happened (no email option on the site) my imagination can’t help but run out ahead of the facts and what I think probably happened saddened me.
However what makes it more than just another poignant story to me is the last time I checked, this dead site was not completely inert.
Spambots in their mindless, relentlessly insectile way were slowly filling it up with fake-cheerful salutations. Mechanically excreting ads and a sliver of text about “Really liking your blog” and then scuttling on.
For reasons I can’t quite explain I find that particular image thoroughly unnerving, and I am quite aware that the very same technology that's been a boon to my family made this scenario possible and delivered it into my head.
What a strange world it has become.
Of Robert E. Lee, Stephen Vincent Benét once wrote that "The heart, he kept locked away/ from all the picklocks of biographers.”
Now, in the age of Facebook, "the heart" is so routinely served up to biographers, celebrity teevee, tabloid rags and the wide, indifferent world on a bed of rice with a complimentary bottle of Dom that the very idea of privacy is starting to be treated as a mild perversion.
Now it appears that, down here in the grubby, transient, below-decks of the blogosphere, whatever legacy we may leave behind is much more in danger from the silverfish of spam.
11 comments:
I know what you mean. The spam vultures take over. I saw a similar thing with the first blogger to put me on a blogroll (fatcat politics). It was heartbreaking to read the comments. Thankfully, even the spammers stopped after a while.
The Posts stop, and the commenters dwindle, and the spambots, like maggots living in a corpse, come in...Something weird and half lighty and sadly biological, in the Annie Dillard way.
Of course, there is that period, where the bereaved (or just needy) show up, and try to bargain.
When FAFBlog stopped posting for the first time, there was a period of his commenters trying to get something going.
And Moon of Alabama is still going at it without the Whiskey Bar.
And, to be practical, one needs a Blogging Living Will, if no posts are made (or you die) comments get turned off after a decent interval.
And then we need some long term storage for dead blogs, as a service to the future historians (probably the cockroaches or from another planet..)
Used to be all we had to fear was the overly sober reverence of graduate students in the social sciences. Now the digital world needs an archivist to protect us from being PaulRevered.
Eventually, when the context shifts, it's all spam. I think the Buddha talked about this but I wasn't there at the time so I'm going on hearsay many times removed.
I think Jon Swift would have seen the humor in it: just as the earthworms are pulverizing his corporeal being, the spamworms are pulverizing his blogoreal being.
Reminds me of the end of "Brazil".
A thousand little bits of paper trash surround Tuttle, eventually dissolving him.
Ya know, this has come up a few times, and I mentioned it to one of Jon/Al's real-life pals last year. If nothing else, I'll add a note to this year's roundup about it. The rest of us can tweak our settings so it can't happen (comments on posts older than a month or whatever go into moderation), or make sure someone trusted has our log-in info. But I'd love to see the situation rectified for the Jon Swift blog.
this too will pass
...and if you check the comments of the past-post in question, you see the little bastards tying themselves on yet again...
Ah, but...
If Jon Swift's digital remains were to be cremated, then there would be no digital body to rise from the grave to New Life on Judgment Day.
What you really seem to have in mind is not cremation, but some sort of embalming, that would preserve the body in at least the superficial appearance it had at the time of death.
Neither of those alternatives seems to me any less or any more disconcerting and sad than just letting the worms have their way with the body. I've never been able to get past the sad, disconcerting fact of the death, to worry at all what happens to the body, literal or digital, of anyone who ever made any difference in my life.
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