As a teenager I was not only a prolific photographer, but I also experienced small bouts of moderate success that saw my photos printed on t-shirts, hung in galleries, and shared across the internet before the age of instagram. As a result I occasionally discover fragments of myself on the internet in places that I would have never anticipated them to be. I have a folder of screenshots from when I have stumbled upon photographs of mine, typically of myself, being used as people’s avatars, on ebay listings, youtube cover photos, years after they were originally published.

I wonder how many of us have experienced a similar form of quiet digital longevity. Not the type where a video goes viral and rapidly replicates through screens for likes and views, but one like pollination by the wind. A seed you planted many years ago propagates slowly through the pages of the internet where its replication will only be identified by the original owner in an act of surreal discovery.

As an adult I am a fairly private person. Across digital spaces I maintain a strict separation of online to irl and a moat exists between my multiple digital lives. People who know me by one pseudonym may know me by another somewhere else. As a teenager I did not have this separation or desire for true anonymity; the internet felt small, and those who knew me in irl did not engage in the digital spaces that I frequented, and if they did, then it would not have mattered as they would be sharing a common space. There was no feeling that being myself required withholding different pieces of myself from either space; I could exist freely within multiple spaces as a singular identity.

When I come across these digital fragments of my younger self, I feel a type of grief, as though I am unexpectedly seeing a photograph of someone who has passed. I am faced with a former identity that is frozen in time, discarded at some stage in my past when I felt the need to diverge from a singular identity. As an art school dropout, I have to laugh a little bit, perhaps Sontag was right? A photograph steals a soul, especially one that is infinitely replicated with no cost or chance to be destroyed.

The idea of digital permanence was not commonplace in my youth. I never considered that something on the internet would persist forever, and if it did, what would be the harm? The internet was small, with no aggregators to cross-pollinate artefacts from one garden to another. To me this stands out as one of the largest differences in experience between the youth who grew up on the internet in the 90’s/early 00’s vs the youth of TikTok.

Digital permanence in an aggregated post-internet world leaves us living in a perpetual identity crisis. Not only is it now acknowledged that your content will exist forever, attributed to you, replicated outside of the digital space that it originally possessed, it is desired. In a defiant act to simultaneously experience both virality without consequence and intimacy at scale, we cycle through pseudonyms as if they are disposable, rather than as if they are bodies that we possess with a single soul across multiple spaces. Often, it is the ‘offline’ us that carries the burden of this fragmentation, as it is the only one that we cannot shed ourselves of yet. An identified internet is an inauthentic internet that stagnates and holds identities hostage.

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