“There is nothing more ephemeral than a website”

The flipside of that phrase is that there is also nothing harder to maintain than a website. So here I am 6 years after my last blogpost because I’ve been feeling that I need to put in writing the backstory of the Skeuomorph press poster “There is nothing more ephemeral than a website” quip attributed to me.

Almost two years ago, in April 2023, my dear friend Hannah Alpert-Abrams was visiting Denver. We made plans to meet one afternoon after work for happy hour, ice-cream, and walking around on a day that was sunny and deceptively cold. We talked about a bunch of things, catching up after a while not seeing each other. Part of our conversation was about what we’d been working on. Hannah had published a few zines in her Shalperta Press, which she characterized as ephemera. As she handed me a copy of her zines, I countered that they were not really that ephemeral. As my brain has formed this memory, it must’ve been at that point when I said something resembling the quip and likely proceeded to retell the anxious stories of the obsolescent digital literature I’ve been studying in the last decade, and how it was their print counterparts that continue to offer glimpses of what they were. Back then, I was in the thick of writing what is now Chapter 3 of my book Binding Media. Print-Digital Literatures from across the Americas. A more elaborate paragraph on what the chapter ended up being about is below for those interested in the nerdiness. When we finished our Aperol spritzes (yes, it was that sunny!), we walked to get ice cream and then sat down at the park until we got too cold to be outside. It was an afternoon that left me feeling energized, heard, and understood. I hope you had as good a time as I did, Hannah.

About a year later, my also dear friend Quinn Dombrowski used the quip on social media and attributed it to me. I replied aware that it sounded like something I would’ve said but I couldn’t quite place where I had said it. In the same BlueSky thread, Hannah reminded me of the utterance’s context. The story of when Hannah mentioned it to Quinn I don’t know. However, the rest is well-recorded history, Quinn visited Skeuomorph Press in May 2024 and, to complete the circle of dear friends, with Ryan Cordell and Isabella Viega designed, composited, and printed the quip in the gorgeous poster that many have seen and acquired (!). I won’t say it hasn’t been a strange experience to see something I said casually circulate more broadly than anything I deliberately published. It’s also great to see the idea be recognizable to many, not because it is “my” idea, but because it speaks of a shared experience. As Quinn mentioned in that BlueSky post, the quip resonates because the issue of obsolescence, even when I was just articulating my own practical struggles as well as the philosophical ones, is one many of us must contend with. I will be forever amazed that Quinn heard about my rant and turned it into something beautiful. Thank you, Quinn.

As people mentioned the poster in various conversations and panels (!) during the recent MLA convention, it became clear to me that the story behind it was one worth sharing, if nothing else for some future DH and Book History trivia questions. But really because it is a story of connections among friends, of being heard, and of finding ourselves in similar affective and work spaces despite geographic distance, burnout, and all kinds of chaos.

Anyway, if you read as far as here, here’s a quick run through of Chapter 3 “Divergent Temporalities in Binding Media” where I think through the impact of planned obsolescence on digital cultural production. I consider how Hartog’s presentism, as cultural perception of historicity, underlies the imperative of innovation and our own cultural willingness to accept the cycle of obsolescence and innovation as inevitable. Yes, even in one of the fields I work in, digital literature. I argue that some scholars have styled the idea of obsolescence as an aesthetic of ephemerality that is distinctive of the materiality of digital literature. I take issue with this position because of two main things 1) not all works of digital literature rest on/propose/develop ephemerality as an aesthetic/poetic/narrative principle—in fact, few do; and 2) because ephemerality is another name for planned obsolescence, the result of industry practices that seek exclusively to boost rapid returns.

Digital preservation (emulation, porting, and even media archaeology labs and centers) is an obvious necessity for those of us hoping to study digital culture. But I argue, following digital archiving extraordinaire Trevor Owens, that digital preservation is always unfinished and, therefore, should not be considered the only avenue to engage in the historical exploration of defunct digital cultural production. This is particularly problematic in literary studies that have relied on the ability to “return” to the text. And even more intriguing when, in the case of the hybrid books I study, there is a print counterpart that we can easily return to and another that resists it.

In contrast, I think through how obsolescence, essentially how broken works of digital literature can shed light on the conditions of possibility that created and made them stopped working. I insist that an obsolete work of digital literature has as much to say as a working one, even when those things might be entirely different. To base these ideas, I borrow from the field of memory studies in Latin America, in particular the work of Nelly Richard and Cristina Rivera Garza, that have always been concerned with the conflict of managing records that have deliberately been made to disappear or those made to present a version of the truth against those that speak of non-hegemonic experiences and perspectives. In particular, I like how Richard proposes that there is no point in countering the hegemonic (usually linear) versions of memory with corrections or detours that end up reifying its power and centrality. Conversely, alternative histories must build their own course from whatever fragments and in whatever orderings are possible.

I take their work to propose we begin studying digital literature, less as literary texts, and more as a broken archive that materializes a set of conflicting histories and industries; that we begin our scholarship of digital cultural production from this set of assumptions, critical of rather than internalizing the ideologies of the tech industry. The snarky tone of the quip, I hope, hints at this.