This file seeks to convey the lifelessness of files we put online.

Stillborn

The internet is a dead place with no life in it. It has no growth or awareness. It does not change with the seasons, flower, wilt, or wither. Therefore, the internet is a womb whose shape we determine by our own actions. This womb is useless insofar as it is without us. Any use given to it is done so by us outside the womb. In other words, the Internet is a human-place; or more specifically, an attempt at a human-place. An attempt at creating a human being, acting to coalesce any and all content into experience, files into endpoints, mere neurons.

Furthermore, the largest use of the Internet, the Web, is a barren desert of human remnants. Each generation entering and attempting to incubate a world which houses interests that are both temporary and disconnected from the other worlds of the internet-desert for which it does not have a link. The web acts as a place for every human being to shear against the landscape and erode their personal niche into it. The forming of a being to show the world. Without recognizing they are as connected as grains of sand are to one another. Fermenting a world of one among millions, creating a syntactically different but conceptually familiar (and oft-repeated) kind of theater stage for a small audience of peers. Yet the theater is empty more often than it is occupied, and the actors are all corpses.

We have an idea, we write it and place it on the Web; we have an image, we make it and place it on the Web. However, after we go to let it germinate it is without us, it loses our life. It might move around, be used as source material, be re-appropriated, or commented on, but even so it is without their life. In this way all content on the web is dead on arrival yet being groomed; still-born. We dress it up as living, giving it personalization through editing and re-appropriation. We hope that our act of resuscitation will sustain it until the next appropriation, until the next body restructures it or comments on it or moves it further from its womb. However, each file is life-less, and we push it around so that it stands out against a background of millions of near-duplicates. We interact with it to give a sense of movement and life. In this way the content of the Web is a desperate attempt at life, an attempt to transmit our being alive and having it recognized in lieu of having any imbued life.

Whether behind the mask of an avatar, anonymously, or willingly using our real identity, we struggle to induce recognition of our being alive, distinct from other users of the internet, other stillborns. Active participation and creation enhances our sense of connectedness but not our connection. We are utterly disconnected from the realm of the living when we become users of the internet. Therefore, a sense that our representations alone can coerce recognition or bring our life into view is false and foolish. No life, no living, no beginning.