Traipsing in the Dark

[Also on The Skirmisher]

Cyberspace is full of dead people; it’s crawling with traces of people’s last thoughts, last sentiments, last human impressions.

In a sense, mankind has unwittingly created an electronic version of immortality.

Simon Ng was a college freshman in New York. In May 2005, somebody tied
him up and repeatedly stabbed him in the chest with a butcher knife—but
that was minutes after Simon made his very last blog entry.

That blog entry later helped the police trace the murderer.

There’s a quirky side story why I signed up on Friendster
in the first place. For some years, I ignored it because I considered
it merely a fad for teenagers. But one day in the summer of 2004, a
girl was murdered in her own condo unit. The girl was a Metrobank
employee, and days after her death, an email circulated that directed
people to her Friendster account. I couldn’t resist it; I was on Friendster faster than you can say “Bienvenido Jesus Torres.”

Since
then, while I struck “friendships” with total strangers, I realized the
heartrending side of Web-based services like blogs and social networks.
People remain “alive” on the Web even years after their passing. And
often, so few realize it.

Friendster,
for example, doesn’t delete an account even if it remains inactive for
many, many months. In October 2004, amateur mountaineer Prana Escalante
died on Mt. Halcon. Anybody who is curious enough may still see her
account and learn how much she loved life and Samurai X.

Sometimes,
things are fresh as today’s headlines. There was a woman who was
manager of that McDonald’s branch on Taft Avenue beside DLSU, and the
last time she accessed her account was hours before her bitter
officemate shot her in the head.

Folks with “normal”
sensibilities are usually “shocked” when I’d tell them I dredge the Web
for traces of people’s lives. But I can’t help it; I’m consumed with
the desire to know these people as human beings, not as some goddamn
statistic.

Like Johnny Smith in Stephen King’s novel, The Dead Zone, or that kid in M. Night Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense,
I see dead people as I caress and romance the dark underbelly of
cyberspace. There are times I’d be staring at my monitor for long
moments, placing myself under their skin, retracing the last seconds
their fingers tapped on those keyboards,

And I wonder and wonder about the meaning of it all.

Technology
gives our human presence some sort of “permalink” to the wired and
wireless masses in such a way that persists as long as the foundations
remain in place. In Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow,
the “evil” genius Totenkopf fools the world for two decades into
believing that he’s still alive, when it’s merely his machines that
have been continuing his work down to the last details of the man’s
disdain of humanity.

And it’s not only about dead people, but also about dead websites. A month ago, I rediscovered the Internet Wayback Machine, and saw again the homepage of a literary site I used to maintain.

I called it The Inkblot,
for lack of any better name. And years after it “died,” I discovered
for the first time how it was full of crap, and how much somebody like
me could change in the past five years.

I often wonder how
things run these days. How everybody can have access to somebody else’s
most treasured feelings and thoughts that would have mortified the
living daylights out of somebody like Beethoven, JD Salinger, or Thomas Pynchon.

And more to the point, how practically anybody can leave persistent vestiges of their lives in cyberspace.

Maybe,
in a universe where lives are short and people know they are doomed,
and where things end without any sense of resolution, we find ourselves
consumed with this desire to leave our mark on things that we touch. We
find ourselves in situations that somebody like Kazuo Ishiguro loves fleshing out.

And maybe, like Bjork in Dancer in the Dark,
it’s our lot to find ourselves so jaded for having seen it all, but
still having the heart to cling on, hold on to the brightness of some
little spark—whenever, however, wherever we find it.

****
Simon Ng’s last blog entry on May 12, 2005.

New York Daily News article about the arrest of his murderer.

Latest Dead MySpace members.

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