Checkpoint saved: Archiving our digital past with Ruby Justice Thelot
I've been interested in archiving digital art and artifacts of the early internet since I first interviewed Joanne McNeil in 2013. At the time, she was the editor of Rhizome, an institution and a magazine focused on digital art museums and affiliated with the New Museum in NYC. For years after meeting Joanne, I checked Rhizome weekly, reading about Alan Turing and the queer history of computing, net-art pioneer Olia Lialina, younger artists like Ed Fornieles, etc.
That's why I was excited to return to the subject of internet archives and interview designer, artist & cyberethnographer Ruby Justice Thelot. In 2023, he published A Cyberarchaeology of Checkpoints, a book that explores Checkpoints, a phenomenon that took place in the comments section of a YouTube video from 2012 to 2021. In 2012, a user taia777 uploaded a video with a lo-fi soundtrack from Nintendo's Donkey Kong Country 2. Users would write a "checkpoint" as a personal life update when the video was algorithmically recommended to them, as if they were saving a point they can return to in a video game.
Over the years, the video amassed over thousands of comments where people shared their big milestones, heartbreaks, and just mundane life updates. But then YouTube took the video down due to the platform's copyright policy. Ruby's book features a selection of 99 Checkpoints, as well as two essays and an interview with Rebane2001, the user who archived the video before it was deleted by YouTube with all the user comments.
I asked Ruby about his earliest memories of being online, the challenges of preserving our personal and collective history, and the future of digital communities.
What's your earliest memory of being a part of a digital community? What did it look like?
I was an only child, and I always saw the internet as a means of connecting with other people. I tried various apps in the 2000s that promised the ability to connect with individuals. I used to see my older cousins chatting online all the time, and none of my friends were really into chatting. I was trying to find people to chat with as well. Those are probably my earliest memories — going from chat room to chat room, trying to find things that could keep me engaged.
But fundamentally, my earliest memories of digital communities are not so much about the websites or apps themselves (which I would have a hard time naming), but more about the computer I was using and the physical experience of going online. This is something I'm very interested in.
In one of my projects, I talk about the importance of the machine, the desk, and the chair on which you sit. I was trying to convey the idea through retelling the story of the Corrupted Blood plague in World of Warcraft. It's not just about being on a video game or playing something or being on a website, but also about considering the materiality of that experience. For some time, I had an installation in my house that recreated the original computer I used. I had a Windows 95 computer, an old fake wood desk, and a chair. I could just go there and access the internet through the portal that I was familiar with from my childhood.
How, in your opinion, the infrastructure of these early communities like AOL shaped the experience of being online?
Last year, I wrote an essay with the amazing Rue Yi called The Balkanization & Babelification of the Internet. In that piece, I’m talking about the way the commercial services model of the internet was somewhat restrained. AOL and other services worked as different gateways of the internet, and they had different affordances, designs, and communities that are on these platforms. When I think back about that era, there's a boundedness and constancy. Whereas now, there's no balance. The world is endless, and it's probably harder to deal with mentally and psychologically, the unboundedness of the internet.
In my essay called The Importance of Being-on-Line, I’m talking about the fact that in the era of the early internet experience, when you step away from the computer, you're no longer in connection with that digital realm, so there is a bounded space and time for that experience. Now, with the computer in our pockets, it's almost as if this connectivity with the online is never-ending, right? I think it changes the way you interact with communities.
What made Checkpoints so special to you and what made it stand out in the current era of online communities?
What strikes me about Checkpoints is the numerous attempts people have made to create something similar. Just this week, I received an invitation to try out PI.FYI, a new app from the founders of the
newsletter. They have transitioned into a full app that functions as a unique form of social media based on recommendations. There are countless apps aimed at providing an alternative to the Facebook monopoly, as people are constantly trying to carve out their own niche. At one point, there were several smaller networks attempting to emerge but never quite succeeded.This situation highlights the folly of design in some ways. We often have grand ideas of building something for people, following the Field of Dreams notion that if we build it, they will come. However, it is much more complex than that. It is not just about creating user personas, securing funding, and developing an app. People will ultimately do what they want to do and gravitate towards platforms where they feel comfortable. Despite being trapped in a digital environment designed for creating the ideal space for sharing and vulnerability, there is something intangible that drives people to certain platforms.
This is where Checkpoints becomes interesting. It exemplifies what I refer to as transgressive design, where a space or something designed for one purpose is reimagined based solely on the desires and needs of a community. What we call product-market fit in my tech space oftentimes is not so much the will of a product manager but very much understanding what people are using the platform for. For example, in the early days of Facebook, the wall was used almost as a messaging app. And from that realization, Facebook leadership decided to add a function for private direct messaging.
Similarly, Twitter now has the function of LinkedIn, it’s a place where you share your work and meet like-minded professionals. Or Tumblr was launched as an image sharing platform, then it blossomed into this wonderful space for digital communities and aesthetics fandoms. If you think of Tumblr’s design, there's no bounded spaces for communities to form but people were still able to create these digital groups on the platform.
What are the challenges that people face when preserving the output of these communities? Is it at all possible to save the context around the media file or work?
This is one of the paradoxes of my research and my practice. In many ways, I have come to terms with the fact that to preserve is also to destroy. Every archive, every zip file, every monument to digital life is a travesty of what it tries to represent. When we save digital media, whether it be a video or an mp4 file, it exists in a context. So if I save the Checkpoints video and now have the mp4 file, what is missing in the experience of the video over the decade where it existed in the context of the YouTube interface. And that interface also has an impact on how we interact with the content, and that is the beauty of user interface design. It not only influences the content but is also influenced by it, right?
Seeing a painting in a home is different than seeing it in a museum, and seeing it on YouTube is different than seeing it on Vimeo. These platforms have different design styles, different affordances, and different visual vernaculars. That's the first level. Second, is the video all there is to the experience of watching the video? I think the case of Checkpoints makes it clear that it’s so much more. What is required for the archives to be complete are these 45,000 comments left below the video. First, you have the interface; then you have user contributions.
The same goes for an Instagram post by Kim Kardashian. The photo is not just the photo; it's also the millions of likes and comments that create what Nathan Jurgenson calls the social photo. Its meaning is not only to communicate something visual but also social and cultural information about the relevance and importance of that image.
Lastly, I have to go back to the physical. What is missing when I archive the Checkpoints video in a world where 10 years ago, I was watching it in a specific mindset. It's the materiality of that experience. And I'm forced to realize that to understand a memory requires presence. Any attempt for me to separate it from that ontological requirement of being there is essentially a travesty. I end the importance of being online essay with "You had to be there, you had to be online."
It's a big paradox in my work. I still archive things, but I'm well aware that it is imperfect. And I'll never be able to recreate the original context in which it was first experienced
I’m curious about your methodology for archiving your own work and online presence. What are some of the tactics that you find helpful?
I'm using parts of the system created by Rebane2001, who preserved Checkpoints. It’s available on GitHub and allows you to save some of the comments and metadata for all the videos you're archiving. Also I have my personal image archive, which is very diverse — it’s visuals I encounter of 4chan, Tumblr, Pinterest, or somewhere else. I think it’s important to keep the images myself, given that they might disappear over a long period of time.
It's always imperfect. I don't have a perfect system. I don't have the resources like the Internet Archive or to do a full backup of the page when it was posted. So I do what I can. Recently, I was playing Virtual Valerie, one of the first digital sex games, and decided to save the original file that was used by the emulator for me to play it. I also tried to get additional context around the game and the content to create that holistic experience, but it's always incomplete, always imperfect.
I used to work in digital media, and I've been seeing my work from over 10 years ago slowly disappearing even though back then everything you put online seemed so permanent. Do you preserve your writing as well?
I always try to have my students read one of my essays, and one of them clicked on one of the links and told me that it doesn't work. I was like, "Isn't the essay five years old?" I think link rot is a big problem online. As a journalist, you're linking to things and hoping that people will be able to access them in the future, but often by year four or five, the link has expired. So having a personal archive is very important because we unfortunately cannot rely on these platforms or any external party to be the guardians of our own memories.
In the world of platforms, we'll have an individual account and often it feels like a personal archive. Is there some tension between creating a personal memory vault and also not being beholden to your past?
There is a tension between the crystallization of the self online — specifically through the act of posting — and the desire to change over time. I don't have a clear solution to this conflict, but for most people an archive that is out of sight is not a big hindrance. You may have all of your Facebook photos on an SD card somewhere because you took them on a digital camera in 2012 instead of having them on your computer or on Facebook.
I've seen people actually keep Instagram post all the way from the time they were teenagers in 2015, and that doesn't prevent them from being completely different as an individual. Fundamentally, I think the person who is concerned about rupture is probably audience captured, i.e. they don't want to disappoint their followers. But I think this is not so much an issue for most individuals whose follower count is below what I call Dagsen's number. In one of his reports, Dagsen Love, a model, strategist, and friend of mine, talked about 1500 being a number of followers when you're not captured by your audience because at this scale, your average degree of separation is low enough that you don't have to worry. If you change in real life, then you can change online as well and people will see it on the weekends when you go out together.
Once you pass that 1500 number, things start to get harder. There's a perception of the self that is being constructed. There's no solution for that. I think fundamentally, we're not supposed to have more than 1500 people looking at our posts on a daily basis. But there's no scientific or study behind it. It's pure speculation.
What will happen after profile-based platforms? What are your predictions about the future of digital communities?
I think 2020-2021 were the peak of the digital community. Then 2022 and 2023 brought an added level of complexity to relationships, namely the advent of artificial media through deepfakes — voice synthesis, artificial images, and now even artificial videos. So the primitive assumption that you once had was that if you’re on a Discord, 99% of users are probably real. That assumption is diminishing over time, and the impact is that once we start to think about this as the diminishing fidelity of video, image, and sound, then this counterintuitively heightens the value of one-to-one communication.
You trust mutual follows whom you have a rapport with, and acquaintances and friends which you have a physical connection with. In the next five or ten years, physical presence will be critical because remains to be the unalterable part of our interactions. I think it kick-starts a lot of these communities online, but in order to get to that next level, it will require repeating physical touchpoints, which are so important in a world with an abundance of artificial media.
Do you think there will still be Dark Forest communities and big platforms? Is it still a theory of the internet that’s applicable to what we’re seeing today?
I am still very bullish on the Dark Forest theory, mainly because even if the risk of public exposure is waning, we're still feeling this danger. For a regular person, it’s not worth it to post something, especially they have no business interest in becoming famous or being known.
People are retreating to these smaller community spaces because this is where users can just be themselves. They don't have to pretend to be someone else or be cool; they can say what they want to say without having a brigade of oppositional forces attack them. And so, to me, that is still going to remain the thing until the culture on the internet changes, which might actually happen faster than we expect. But for now, I think it's all about private Discord group chats and closed-off communities until the dark forest predators are gone, right?
In your recent essay, you said that the new metric you measure successful communities by is “time-to-touch.” Do you have good examples of online communities that attempt to focus on that?
I'm a member of FWB, and I led product there for a couple of years. We have a few points of congregation all over the world through our decentralized event system called Event Keys. Plus, we have this annual congregation called Fest which happens in the woods in California. It's happening again in 2024. It’s where the community gets together — to me, it’s an amazing idea but also just fundamentally important for the sustainability of the community over a long time. So the time to touch there is around nine months, which can be a bit long. But you do have these smaller touch points with the Event Keys in New York, Singapore, or somewhere else depending on where you are.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Subscribe to Ruby’ Substack,
, to read his recent essays and research. You can also check out his reading list on his website. Here are some of the Ruby’s recent favorites:Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by Norbert Wiener;
Memory Theater by Simon Critchley;
The Twofold Commitment by Trinh T. Minh-ha.