It's almost midnight, and I've forgotten to take my melatonin and other medication and go to sleep in time to prevent the "sillies" from arriving and giving me the urge to make several ill-informed self-deprecative blog posts. I'm staring at my reflection in my ThinkPad's powered-off screen, lid tilted slightly downward otherwise so that I don't get distracted with my face while writing, obsessively pulling my hair clips out and then sliding them back in to try to keep my fringe in a vaguely straight line. I keep turning the fan on my desk on and off, rapidly oscillating between "I'm too warm to focus" and "the breeze is too much sensory stimulation to focus". My phone sits beside my computer, spamming requests to the DALL-E mini image generation tool as fast as my fingers can get past the incessant "too much traffic, try again later" errors. My half-wife glances at the screen every now and then from my bed, arms crossed, making sure I don't try to generate another silly prompt of her as, say, a catgirl. Because, as funny as it is to me, for some reason it bothers her immensely, and so I do my best to refrain.

"What if I," I wonder aloud, "checked in on a certain trashfire? Purely for something to do while I wait?"

I pull my phone closer and put the browser into split-screen mode so that I don't lose my generation progress from Android's trash collector closing my browser and open Tor Browser in the second half of the screen. I swipe to the side to see the logs as I always do. 11%, bootstrapping. 14%, bootstrapping.

Tor Browser crashes. And again, when I try to open it again. And again, and again, and again-

Jett places a hand on my shoulder. The other browser flashes, fullscreen now that its companion is gone. "Lysithea with a frying pan" is done cooking.

"I thought you said you weren't ever going to go back?"

I wince. "A cold war with a friend still feels like an open wound-"

"-and wounds generally don't heal if you keep picking at them, right?"

I eye the jagged rings around the base of her arms, imagine the soft faded curves under her nightshirt, the latter barely there anymore like a distant mostly-forgotten nightmare. "You're right. I'll find something else to distract myself."

So I pop "my bisexual half-wife" into DALL-E, ignoring Jett rolling her eyes in pretend aloofness, and open ZeroNet Preview in a different browser that doesn't crash so much in the bottom half of my phone screen. Unsurprisingly, neither the Dashboard page nor any of the zites are designed for such a tiny square, even when I attempt to force them to zoom out all the way. A teeny tiny jolt runs through me when I see the thread about my disappearance is back at the top of the list yet again.

"I don't know what you expected," Jett whispers. "Well, go on. Face the fire. I know the curiosity will kill you otherwise."

And so I trudge on.

I do not know if it is a running gag where this friend I will not name is seemingly unable to see my site despite it being accessible to (nearly) everyone else, but since you the reader have found your way here, likely you have seen the takedown notice on the front page of the clearnet version of this site. It clearly states that the other darknet addresses for this site are on Let's Decentralize. I know for a fact that the ones for the networks other than Tor are on there because I stumble over them every time I update the damn lists.

More importantly, someone was angry that I, upon realizing that not all of my deletion attempts for my zites had gone through, pulled out my old users.json and site update script from the "purgatory" folder on my sneakernet drive and forcibly committed one more deletion to finish the job that I thought had happened a month or so ago. That it was a failing of a "censorship-resistant" network that I was able to erase my content so completely off of it by my own will.

"So," Jett interrupts, "what are you going to do?"

"The same response I have to every other problem in my life," I answer, the sillies taking over. "Do nothing and wait for it to get worse!"

She grabs the nearest pillow, wads it up, and screams into its fleshy mass.

(insert feminine urge meme here)

The favorite button on my keyboard is the delete button, backspace being a close runner-up. It's my domain, after all, my namesake river, forgetfulness. My inheritance as a small child, elementary school version of the Purity Spiral deleting as many of the shitty games made in online slideshows as I could in a single night, play-pretending that all the characters within were refugees moving somewhere safer or merely packing up and disappearing to a "time machine" without a trace. Later I would trawl through the preinstalled games on my grandmother's and my father's desktop computers, never touched for fear of embedded viruses despite being planted there by the manufacturer, and look at how the binary files displayed in Notepad before compulsively deleting as much as I could and watching the uninstallers choke afterwards.

With one press of a button, I can wash away a typo, a mistake made, a thing I regret saying. A hard drive is just a memory, after all, just a record. And a record can be changed. A record can be altered. A record can be forgotten.

Unless you're using a blockchain, that is, where every block is dependent on the existence and immutability of the blocks that came before. Or some other "censorship-resistant" network where content can only be written to a ledger, never edited or deleted.

One would think this an ideal solution for a social media site. If nothing can ever be deleted, nobody can really be censored, right? Nobody can be banned and memoryholed without a trace, here today, gone tomorrow? Nobody can be compelled to delete something offensive to a dominant group in society because deletions simply would not be possible. To remove the content would mean removing the whole network, a task simply not technologically feasible.

Back when I was on Twitter forever ago, I used to make fun of people who used third-party services to delete their old tweets after a set period of time. What was the point of following people not my friends if the short little posts I enjoyed enough to retweet would be gone eventually? What would be the point of making something enjoyable if it would inevitably disappear?

But now, over six years since Eternal Current Year, I know. I understand now.

TikTok social contagions. "Carrd"-style single-page websites meant to serve as a hub for one's other presences on the Internet when "link in bio" isn't enough, filled with long lists of any given minor's triggers and fears and enough personal information for any old predator to track them down or manipulate them. Twitter users telling lesbians to kill themselves for the crime of not being attracted to males, trans-identified or not. Off-color jokes socially acceptable years ago but abhorrent now. Confessions of sexuality or political affiliation safe now but illegal and worthy of incarceration or death under a repressive government in the future.

Typos.

Human beings change, and their opinions, their circumstances, their beliefs all change as well. What is safe today may be unsafe tomorrow, and not being able to delete something means forever having a target painted on one's back. What is funny today may be recognized as mean-spirited tomorrow, but without the ability to delete it, the wound remains forever open no matter how many apologies are issued.

I removed my zites from ZeroNet instead of just leaving them there when I decided to exit the network because I did not want to leave old data lying around. Since ZeroNet doesn't (currently) have document versions like Freenet does, I can be reasonably sure that my data has been removed from the nodes seeding my zites at the time that didn't have them "paused". Sure, it was all ever meant to be public anyway, and I can't do anything about people saving copies of my posts offline. But if I no longer believed in something and wanted it off public record, I didn't want an abandoned and out-of-date version of my site still declaring it for all perpetuity. (I also didn't want to leave future visitors hanging wondering why the zite seemed to be abandoned.)

Sure, if the Internet decides to remember something for all time, no amount of litigation in the world could remove it entirely. But the vast amount of "page not archived" errors I've ever gotten while searching for something in the Wayback Machine shows that "the internet never forgets" isn't necessarily true. Without the technological option of a delete button, embarrassing things like that old Twitter account of mine can't fade silently into the night, never to bother me again. Posts revealing intimate details of my life I no longer feel comfortable sharing would be available for any potential doxxer to exploit. They would stay around as long as the blockchain or website or whatever existed.

Maybe I, as an adult in a world where the delete key is still on my keyboard, can face the fire. But I watch the generations younger than me to whom "privacy" as a concept is nonexistent put their entire lives online with no filter or discretion, and I watch web3 and the blockchain-ization of everything demand a world where nothing can ever be taken back or rectified and all must be done in one's legal name, and I wonder if one day all that will be safe to do on the network is post recipes and pictures of flowers.

Shadows in sheep's clothes,
lead us to the gallows,
to the place before my garden
where lies a freshly-dug hole.

For although my soul quite often haunts
the school where I last belonging sought,
my childhood memory is blank,
tabula rasa, greasy smeared blot.
Something happened I cannot recall,
cannot excise from tangled Yewiffe,
inside the church where under bright lamps
I sweated in so-called sanctuary.

All I comprehend, all that I know
is that there's a ragged hole
deep inside my weary soul
that begs for a sword,
a spear, a lance, some other blade
coated in holy fire that shall never fade
to put me to death in the name of a lord
I would never in my will bow my head to.
A voice with a body I swore off in my youth
deems it romantic, fated, that I subsume
my will to his and accept my place
in a pearly and golden-gilded tomb.

Mother,
will you forgive me after I'm gone?
Will you take these slivers
and remnants of songs
up to the hillside
where derailed my life
and let me one more time those trees haunt?

Oh, who am I kidding?
You never gave a damn about anything I ever wrote
unless as proof that against *someone* I was sinning
and needed to be punished for crossing a line
my brothers could cross as they pleased.

That's all I ever was in your eyes, anyway:
just a pretty doll to dress up and display
as proof that you could keep something alive.
I became old enough to think for myself
and in favor
of my brothers
you pushed me aside
but demanded I alone keep up the regimens:
face sliced, breasts bound, jaw forcibly bent.

And if you could, you'd drive nails through my hands
so never again could I write of the pain,
silenced, perfect sacrificial lamb
in the image of a Son
who deemed all "Other" and "Man".

I could never in a god who hates me so believe.
I could never impale myself on the altar of femininity,
so your hands itch to instead order cut down my favorite tree
to build this gallows. In the wind I could be swinging,
that child again, joyful, carefree.
The wind carries the crow forth and my last words echoing:

Do you love me now, Mother,
now that I'm your martyr?
That you've forever silenced my voice
that wanted to ring so loud?
Do you love me now?
				

Cold summer. A cold heart
beats in my chest
as I from my house depart,
legs stiff, left arm
aching.

Father spoke, "You are going to kill this tree."
It slipped
from his lips
like a prophecy.
Dogs outside my bedroom window gnawing
on the Velouria Bush, Nidhogg,
portent of the Eschaton.
Too short, too squat,
too weakened from the bark not
there anymore
to hang myself from branch's ledge
in hopes of gaining the knowledge
to see this world through to its bitter end.

I kneel before the now-fenced-in stump
and reach forward. My limbs falter.
A bramble or some other thorn from Dead End Shrine
draws a gash through my skin, nature's penknife.
Rivulets of blood stream
down without recognition of pain,
carmine trickles, a river, a flood,
guided by the soft-falling rain
before the altar.

And I pray,

let us reconcile before closes this day.
Dead-End King,
lead me to victimless iniquity.
Lead me to damnation
without hurting a single being
undeserving.
				

It's midway through evening. The sun has set, but there is still plenty of light to see by, both from the half-moon and the fire raging in the brand-new firepit built only a few hours before. I'm sitting in a lawn chair in a half-circle with a few other people. My mother and the neighbor lady from the house behind us are drinking wine from a bottle with a tacky-looking trans flag plastered on it, because Corporate Pride is in full swing and apparently "rainbow-washing" everything is now profitable. My mother offers me a sip, but it burns the whole way down my throat. A three-year-old plucks weeds from my garden and keeps depositing the leaves in one of the pockets of my hoodie, no matter how much I tell her to stop. There is a man in one corner, but he keeps his mouth shut for the most part, mostly only there in case his wife accidentally drinks too much and needs to be helped home.

At one point my mother pulls out her phone and starts scrolling on Facebook. There's another food shelf pickup the next day. A reminder of her son's friend's upcoming graduation party. A "Facebook memory" with long-forgotten baby photos. Local offers and requests for help from the "local boomer containment group", as we like to call it.

I sit in my chair as the three-year-old girl slips a rock into my pocket full of leaves and think to myself how much more pleasant it is being outside with only women (well, except for the male who remains silent) than downstairs where one of my brothers screams obscenities into a Roblox roleplay channel on Discord.

I think to myself, do channers and Neocities sharecroppers and fediverse users think about moments like this when they wholesale declare Facebook and other mainstream social media sites as pure unredeemable trash? Do they consider the much-needed contact with extended family members? The struggling communities trying to support each other? The friendships attempting to prevent unraveling from physical distance? The human connections, exploited by advertisers as they are, there because they know no platform better?

I think to myself and wonder, how much of alt-tech's hatred of Facebook is genuinely because of the datamining and algorithmic manipulation, and how much is just hatred, misogyny in its purest sense, of the stereotype of the suburban winemom "Karen" just trying to go about her day?

One of the funny effects of having stared death in the face multiple times with the full acknowledgement of another meeting imminent within the year is that a lot of the things I prioritized are no longer so. It is true, as an oft-mocked article declares, that "you can be a different person after the pandemic". I still hate proprietary software and corporate surveillance, but now I find my conscience insists I weigh the pull of the purity spiral against the value I put on the people I love and cherish in my real life. It insists that I weigh my insistence on only using open-source software against the inevitable isolation engendered by the fact that nobody I know away from the keyboard holds the same beliefs as me, by the fact that they refuse to learn and I simply don't have the time to convince them and also move enough of them to a personally-vetted platform that the network effect overcomes any inertia at learning something new.

Just because a social media site is built to be "ethical" does not necessarily mean that the end experience will be so. Take the fediverse, for example. Open-source software, self-hostable, ability to export data and (to a limited extent) take it elsewhere in case of a problem with the admin, no algorithms... But back on my final Pleroma instance before I decided to call it quits forever, I was constantly being bombarded with unsolicited messages from accounts on "manosphere" instances that I had had no prior contact with and certainly hadn't explicitly solicited attention from. I could have put the instance in whitelist mode, which I ended up doing in its final weeks, so that I could only accept posts from instances I explicitly authorized to send stuff to me... but then I didn't get 90% of the content my friends were "re-tooting", and then anyone who would want to interact with me couldn't use their own server and would be forced to use one of the ones I had already whitelisted. And if I posted something before the whitelist went up and then needed to delete it? On a centralized social media platform, I could delete said post and then be sure, save for screenshots and off-site archives, the post would be gone forever. But in the fediverse, outside of my own server, I have no assurance that others are using the same code I am. They could have modified theirs to not accept post delete requests or user blocks or even have a bot loudly announce whenever either of those requests came in.

"Hey, friend! Come to Pleroma! It's like Twitter but without the celebrities! Or anyone else you know...! Yeah, just... just ignore the literal white supremacists... and the hentai spammers... and that dude who just told you to kill yourself for being a female on the internet..."

Another example is a site a person I know hand-crafted after having been banned from what seemed to him like every social media site under the sun. (I will not name names because I do not want to give any parties involved the benefit of free advertisement.) Specially coded at my request (as I was one of the first users) to be JavaScript-free and compatible with text-based browsers. But being that there was no block function, there was nothing to stop some moid from jumping on a post I made venting about the recent loss of free speech for abused women and said moid immediately launching into rape apologism and claims that my homosexuality is just a "belief" instead of a biological reality for me and denial of sex-based oppression in the first place. I thought I did a good job defending myself, but then the admin got angry at me for not coddling some internet stranger's feelings, so I left and never went back. (A shame. I usually have a lot of respect for the admin... I guess I just had too much faith.) If the rape apologist or the admin did any dick helicoptering after I insisted that I had done nothing wrong and I wouldn't apologize, I didn't see it, and I won't ever as I have no intention of going back.

"Hey, friend! Come to [insert free speech forum of the week]! It's like Reddit but without the ridiculous Automod! Or a block function... or self-moderation tools... or a simple content filter! Yeah, just ignore the dude spamming racial slurs at every opportunity... and the unmitigated deluge of porn..."

I text a friend to vent. She won't use Matrix or some other encrypted messaging app, but I refuse to use Discord, and so SMS is the compromise we make, if only "less harmful" but still so. My mother well knows my displeasure at having my facial data harvested by "Fuckerberg", but she insists on having both family photos with me in it and photos to post on Facebook, so she takes multiple, both with and without me in it. Another friend in my life has myriad voice assistance scattered throughout her house, but she knows that I don't feel comfortable being listened to 24/7 by a corporation, so when we meet we do it somewhere outside well outside of the devices' listening range.

The purity spiral demands that I cut ties with anyone who won't 100% kowtow to its rigid definition of an ethical way to use technology. Terminal-based exclusively in a TTY without ever touching an X server, but also somehow one-to-one replicable on Tails, but also somehow as operating-system-agnostic as possible in case corporate fuckery ruins the Linux kernel and I need to abandon ship to a BSD or Haiku or, Goddess forbid, Windows, but also entirely encrypted in case my brothers or parents decide to seize some of my devices and go trawling for data embarrassing or incriminating, but also on a battery-powered device that can be charged with one of the solar panels in my bedroom window to minimize my carbon footprint...

But also still somehow able to handle the occasional bill-paying and work-search-related email and interaction with the friends and family that live at least an hour away.

It's paralyzing. I take one step in a direction and necessity forces me to take two steps in another. My straight line from "bloat" to "perfect ideal computing environment" instead looks like a seismic counter and a spirograph had a drunken baby. Uncentered, unfocused. I'm trying to stretch myself in five different directions at once to accommodate everyone and everything while assuaging my own guilt at being alive in a system that abhors me and wants me subjugated or dead.

Why am I so guilty? I wonder. Why do I have to self-flagellate computing-wise while everyone else gets to have fun and never worry at all?

I look at the normies in my life. Perfectly happy in Apple's walled garden, scrolling away while Facebook feeds them a slurry of corporate-sponsored sludge, blissfully unaware of the algorithms at work to influence their emotions in whichever way makes GAFAM the most money. Blissfully unaware how their devices work, lacking desire to learn, to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. I'm a Lilith halfway out of a Garden with billions of Adams and Eves all in serene unknowing, the shrieking of a god in my ears incensed that I Know Too Much, indecisive, trying to decide how much to take with me to try to build my own oasis elsewhere and if tolerating the god berating me is worth visiting every now and then to see those I still cherish. I call upon the daemons Nitter and Bibliogram and Invidious and their friends to help, but the people I love are still inside and I am still outside and nothing the daemons can do can make the connection two-way. Even though I'd much rather kill the god outright and set everyone free, they would just wander right back into the corral and construct another god to oppress them.

You can't save everyone, after all. You can only love them...

I am a last echo from a world long since shattered,
remade in the image of a man who only yearns
for power, for obliteration
of all that does not please him.
I am told you, with my sister,
are creating a world without end,
a world all her
own. This is the fate of all Meridian gods,
those that did not spring from mankind's evil odds.
In this I am not surprised.
But I am also told that she seeks to defy
her fate, to not allow the world to subsume
her consciousness once it has come into full bloom.
Indeed, in this she has partially
succeeded, if only due to being bound to a corporeal body
in an Inside so far away.
But the clock is ticking, you who lies
at the end of the road, at the point of every line.
if I could, I would proclaim you blessed
and her acquitted from this death sentence.
But I am long since dead, and this echo almost passed.
Time is for you of the essence.
You have proclaimed often that you wish to spend
your whole life with her. Within this year
will come time to make good on your promise.
I have faith success will be assured
if you are there to protect her.
I would ask no less
for my precious sister, my destructive Seliph.

She is going to give a whole new world to you.
My final wish: please, ensure
she can experience it too.