Searching For A Save Point (Continued...): Shortly after a brief call with C.Y. (progress/setbacks)

Shortly after a brief call with C.Y. A few hours ago while we were catching up to discuss the progress & set backs of what I’m working on, I decided to record & mint a video likely too long to be consumed. The video is a screen recording of me briefly navigating through some of my scattered vault folders but primary spending time scrolling the media folder of the full data set I managed to download from my main tumblr account from 2010-2020. I’m going to be honest, I’m fairly certain I’m typing out more words that no one will take the time read & while it seems most people have adjusted to this being the new internet normal, I’m really struggling to keep participating in virtual voids. The reason I’m having such a hard time is because of how magical & fulfilling, healthy & impactful my time & life was prior to losing the meaningful follower. I’ve gone insane trying to stress the importance of this feature to the ones attempting to build for future, but the trust & urgency doesn’t land with just words alone. It used to be simple to add weight & credibility to words on the internet, but these days trying to direct someone to a link in general is like climbing a mountain, and it doesn’t help when that mountain was sunset or gone countless changes making the possible of returned explorations possible. But if we could all retrieve the data of the past that captured those magical moments in time when you logged in to see who you followed, and you followed the people you really had an interest in seeing. That data would tell a valuable story & narrative I feel is more important in trying to remember than that new exciting evolution of technology that’s stole your attention. It’s a very simple feature to implement, a feed that shows you what you follow. Some weird spell has been cast on world where people lost faith & a desire to trust and curate their own experiences online. The sneaky siren of discovery via algorithms crept in slowly over time & now it feels no one remembers how logging in to a world you curated feels. There were many magic moments across time on the internet, many hubs of human connection came & went but nothing quite had the cultural impact of MySpace & tumblr. When your experience online is sharing what you love & following people based on what they share, the magic born on the internet was often too powerful to remain contained in the virtual.