Wired Archaeology

If a large enough website such as Reddit, SomethingAwful, Twitter, Tumblr, were drawn out as a three dimensional city, it would tower over the surrounding flatlands by the tell below it. The volume of content, whether produced at a gradual pace over a longer lifespan, or produced all concurrently in a shorter lifespan, would pile up like the layers upon layers of compacted detritus below a modern city still on the site of an ancient one, each previous age’s refuse accumulated to make up the foundation of the present structures rising to the sky and to immediate access. Reddit locks posts older than six months, as the older posts are stifled beneath mounds of dirt, confined to archives, catacombs, subterranean bones left to fossilize, uninteractable as the surface buildings, the latest posts and constructions are.

In order to piece together narratives from these accumulations, internet archaeologists have spent quite a bit of time digging through these deep layers, sorting unsortable piles of refuse to piece together findings in a string. The SomethingAwful archives are not searchable. Link rot kills much of what existed before the internet became monopolized, the internet archive drops weighty content like images and videos. In order to put together something usable, a common thread has to be pre-established as a heuristic with which to sort through the findings, to order and direct it along a common narrative goal, as can be seen in the likes of Fredrick Knudsen and Geno Samuel, focusing on a single individual to direct their searches through the depths and order their findings between valued and not.

The ARG has grown ever more sophisticated in response to this form of archaeology, hiding itself among traces, linked by a subtle clue across dispersed artefacts scattered in obscurity. The ARG creators have learned their craft from the archaeologists who act more like Indiana’s father, desperately searching for a single “X marks the spot” at the end, tracing down single paths to a final goal. In the traditional case, a goal such as the tomb or city, in the modern case, the dox or history of a person. These archaeologists engage in something more directed than the previous, more malicious, with the former type being more concerned with cataloguing while this often goes hand in hand with targeted harassment of some kind, but both are engaged in the same activity.

From where does the data to be searched emerge from? The archaeologist looks through tells, piles of detritus, the materiality cast off from living. With everything connected on a single medium, the internet, the detritus cast off, the materiality that results from living, this form of generating data by the traces of one’s life turns to extreme degrees. As some have remarked, the most well studied archaeological case, Chris Chan, may be the most documented human alive due to decades of interaction with the internet being findable and thus catalogable and insertable into the grand narrative these researchers can create. The new form of text created by the internet is in fact the oldest form of text, the text of a life, written in the wake of that life’s movements, the text written by human traces. The new form of text created by the internet is a form of text which is unique for being the oldest text, pre-existing even the most primitive deliberate art, now in a degree unprecedented previously. Where once, a single trashpile would speak for an entire city, now volumes exist to catalogue the minute movements of a single individual, writing by motion.