Checkpoints and The Shock of Deletion

50th episode, Pop culture personality quiz, old MySpace pages, Spotify Wrapped 💚 💜

This week, the 50th episode of Nicstalgia was released! Yay!!!!! Thank you very much for watching or listening to the show and reading this newsletter! I enjoy this project more and more as time goes on. I’m very excited to play with new formats, push myself creatively, and continue having deep conversations about superficial things, with fun and interesting people! 💚 💜

Enjoy this cute lil mini mag inspired by YM, CosmoGIRL!, J14, and all of the magazines from the 90s-00s. Take the quiz below to see which Nicstalgia Personality you are! There’s a poll below where you can share your answer!

Support Nicstalgia with a paid subscription for less than the cost of the Bratz® x Cult Gaia Special Edition Designer Yasmin™ Fashion Doll* with 2 Outfits.

*Fun fact: Cult Gaia’s founder, Jasmin Larian Hekmat, was the original inspiration for the Yasmin doll. Her dad is the billionaire businessman, founder and CEO of MGA Entertainment, which owns Bratz. Nepo baby goals!!!!!

🍒 This Week on Nicstalgia

Ruby Thelot is featured on this week’s episode of Nicstalgia. He shares how his love for studying and researching niche internet communities and cultures led him to writing his forthcoming book, A Cyberarchaeology of Checkpoints. We talk about how the concept of checkpoints originated in video game culture and took on a subversive new form as personal life status updates in a YouTube comments section. What happens when a community is formed by thousands of checkpoints in a YouTube comments section, and what happens when that YouTube video is deleted?

We explore the shock of deletion, the jarring experience of no longer having access to a digital space you once frequented. (RIP MySpace.) In the words of internet archivist Rebane2001, “Forget what you lost, save what you can.” Is everything meant to be saved? We ponder the concept of media ephemerality and why we assume permanence of what’s on the internet when we expect real-life places to come and go. (RIP to my Midtown hair salon.)

Digital media is full of paradox – abundance devalues digital media and makes access harder (i.e. trying to find one of the 7500 photos on my phone), preservation disrupts the content’s original environment (i.e. downloading my Xanga archives), and materiality affects relevance and value. We dive into the intricacies of memory and technology, my Buddhist internet philosophy, and how deletion of digital artifacts erases stories, memories, and ‘monuments of emotional history’, therefore impacting the future interpretation and legacy of our civilization.

I ask Ruby what he’d leave in a digital time capsule, the ethics of digital life after death, the morality of AI when “we can only perceive the present once it is the distant past”, and how media literacy and astuteness will develop for young generations in a new digital age.

Watch/listen: YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts

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📲 I’m Just a Simple Girl in a High-Tech Digital World

My fav things from the internet rn:
I’m enthralled by the study of technology and memory! If you’re learning about checkpoints for the first time this week, Ruby wrote an article about mnemophagy – an exploration of the impact of technology on memory – that gives great context.

I had a front row seat to Ruby’s talk, Why We Fall For Robots, at Future Primitive’s NPC Day. My favorite part was the ‘anatomy of social robots’, where a Tamagotchi is used as an example of technology that people feel a personal relationship with. (You’ve probably heard the story of my “dog” Katie LOL.) If the Tamagotchi was taken apart and just looked like a computer chip, it would not foster a sense of connection. However, its super cute interface and anthropomorphism – human traits or emotions given to things that are not human – encourage consistent connection and care.

“Once we take care of a digital creature, train it, teach it, or amuse it, we become attached. We connect to what we nurture, and we nurture what we love. When they are material, social robots also play on cuteness in the case of dolls or Tamagotchis, to enhance the attachment and provoke a nurturing response.”

We chatted on the show this week about the shock of deletion and what happens when somewhere you frequented digitally is gone. For me, MySpace obviously comes to mind, as do Flash Games. I loved this Internet Artifacts project that chronicles very cool internet moments in history (PizzaHut’s first online pizza delivery website, Jennifer Love Hewitt Geocities page, Beanie Babies site, Ask Jeeves, Napster, MySpace, “Numa Numa”, etc.) I also HAD to find info about the old Game Show Network (GSN) website, where I would play Phrase Frenzy for hours. I’m inspired to make my own Time Capsule archive of YouTube videos for posterity.

I think about celebrity MySpace pages often (although my sister said to me recently that my Roman Empire might be Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, which tracks). Here are more of my favorites: Lily Allen (2006), Katy Perry (2006), Fall Out Boy (2005). I found a few more from MySpace famous people I liked – before the “normal” person to influencer to internet famous person pipeline existed – and their pages feel almost too personal to share. Feels like looking at someone’s diary now. I guess it kind of was, when we were experimenting what it was like to share pieces of ourselves online for the first time. Now I’m getting emotional!!!

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🎶 That’s a Wrap

I love Spotify Wrapped because even though it’s literally a big tech company that consistently tracked my data for more than 65,000 minutes this year, it presents the data in a cute visualization all about ⭐️ ME ⭐️ and my subjectively incredible taste in music!!!!! Lol. My favorite and most listened album of the year is Caroline Polachek’s “Desire I Want to Turn Into You” (okay fine and Speak Now TV and 1989 TV), but let’s be real, I still listen to these songs on repeat.

It’s also very exciting and rewarding to see Wrapped as a podcaster. My theme for this year was working smarter, not harder, and not burning myself out by producing quantity > quality content. Tbh I am stressed and not naturally motivated by growth metrics, but it is nice knowing that the show lands with people and they like it enough to share/connect with others about it. If I was on your Wrapped this year, please comment below or reply to this email with a screenshot so I can thank you personally 🙏 I appreciate you, and I am excited for what 2024 holds for Nicstalgia!

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🧨 Spice Up Your Life

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