I left behind a city lifestyle to live remotely on a mountain. The infrastructure serves local needs while not completely cut off from global supply. Although I left the city, I still constantly encounter the feed of cities. The images that scroll past my eyes and the speed of which I consume them is a behavioral trait from cities. Instagram is Times Square or Shibuya crossing or the Vegas strip. Why do I constantly put myself in the places I don’t want to be? Why am I hanging out in the most central traffic jams of the developed web? I’ve recently been imagining what it would mean to hide out in the ruins of cyberspace. If the once majestic hotels of Acapulco, or the never-occupied cities in abandoned development in China, or American big box shopping malls turn liminal spaces; were web platforms, what would those platforms be? There are platforms that have disappeared entirely; demolished and cleared forever. What I search for are platforms that still hold their space, their structure still open to visit. Such platforms of past eras that still operate albeit sparsely are livejournal, geocities, dailymotion, flickr and recently evacuated tumblr. The mass population has evacuated out of these spaces. The spaces of congregation have monopolized into corporate giants, deserting the explorational and aspirational spaces of earlier web. It is not my desire to repopulate such spaces. I think the notion of places needing to be populated to be worthwhile; and that every friend, colleague and network connection should migrate back to the uninhabited provincial web is unsustainable to maintain such an agency. You can apply the same psychology to the early gentrification of urban spaces of white flight or industrial abandon, becoming remote squats and slowly repopulating to the point of revitalization. In the act of rediscovery, how can revitalization be avoided? Or are we doomed to the cycle of settler-colonial pathology- The insatiable instinct to pave the way for the rest of the colony. Isn’t that the looping dichotomy we find ourselves in? Of pioneers and followers? Aren’t influencers just another form of western manifest destiny expansionism? Right now, in the advent of Trump 2.0 tech oligarchy, there are movements of web “refugees” such as from tiktok to rednote, X to bluesky. Movements which predictably follow the same schematic to repopulate a new platform. It is probable that in the DNA of species that have survived across geological epochs, there is an inherent code to fight off extinction, that commands a species to repopulate at all cost. If we are programmed to survive an apocalypse by constantly repopulating, then perhaps the same ancestral psychology applies to the web. Be that as it may, I am a selfish person seeking the web equivalent of the unabomber's cabin in the woods. Although, if I don’t want to be followed there, why would I publish anything on the web in the first place? What is the desire for self-publishing that is in conflict with the desire for isolation? If the desire is truly to attain isolation then why not stick to the strictly analog offline materiality of letters, VHS tapes and 16mm film? Even in return to “nature” and communality of the 60s as proposed by the cult of Buckminster Fuller would inevitably betray those ideals to form and populate cyberspace into the driver of a neoliberal empire. Likewise the early lower east side punks would lay the groundwork for a mass influx of neoliberal wealth. The inconsistency reveals competing desires. Is the isolation an act of resistance or a performance of resistance? Is isolation a desire that arises after the privilege of already establishing an audience - like such cutely choreographed industry exits that conveniently heightens the rare event of each return of Frank Ocean or Kendrick Lamar. We are all susceptible to performative force-quitting. A desire to leave as a set up for a triumphant comeback.. What is evident is that the desires and revulsions that motivate an exit or migration from societal platforms are complex and contradictory. It is inevitable for our mental health to seek intrapersonal communication, whether it be in the center or the abandoned margins of the web. However, it is evident that the most populated platforms are parasitically feeding loneliness and feeding off the epidemic of loneliness. Migrating to the next massive platform will not cure that deep sense of empty socialization. Perhaps it is a moment of shifting the paradigm, to make concerted efforts to be more intentional and personal with communication again. Not only to deviate onto alternative sites, but in the acknowledgement of the impermanence of data, our capital and our own mortality. Our words, our images, our affects will be erased, why not embrace ephemerality, inconsistency and precarity in our web publishing practice? I seek to be somewhere unstable, somewhere in the realism of the already-dead-web bardo awaiting for complete demolition. I seek to have unreliable points of communication that are subject to constant change, ex. a new email address every week so I can also continually exploit subscription services for their free trials. I believe that practicing chaos and randomness can break us free from the algorithmic spell - to be anarchistic in our patterns to avoid the predictability of our contemporary pathologies en masse. In the quest to conquer mortality, we have lost the freedom of mere invisibility. If our data continues to live forever, the planet will run out of material resources to store it. Thus the choice between accepting the death of our data or accepting the eventual demise of a habitable planet is placed upon the current and next generations to contend with. In the contemporary age where everyone has an audience, perhaps the next shift is the practice of disappearing. Such a move can seem suicidal as a cultural producer, who’s profession is trapped into a cycle of societal games, and the dependency of career survival to reluctantly play the virtual games of power and visibility. When facing such doom, perhaps it is essential to remember the spirit of playfulness that counters the play for power. Perhaps playfulness is the original root of rebellion. Play is the act of subverting a system of control out of the boredom of playing within that system for too long.