R.I.P. e-rat.org

I recently lost my favorite domain, e-rat.org, which I have had for more than 20 years. It has played host to a few different digital experiments, a zine, one of the first sites of the AAARG library, and some attempts at real-time archiving of my own writing and artwork. Through that time, the web centralized into an uneasy ecosystem of a few social media platforms and an unknown number of more or less established traditional media (journalism, essays, etc.) outlets publishing online.

e-rat was my first domain and I liked it at the time because it poked fun at the way we hyped the modernizing shift from offline to online by slapping an e- in front of it (like e-commerce). Electronicified rats sounded perverse, maybe inspiring. Rats thrive in urbanized capitalism, so how do they find their way in the slick, clean, immateriality of the web? It prompts questions about waste and breakdown and how material these things really are. Over time the “e-” became dated. Apple began to shift the focus of attention from the network to the consumer and their personal preferences: iDevices.

If you work in cultural production, you may have also noticed that alongside this shift to the self and the centralization of the web, a trend of self-archiving and self-promoting vanity domains has emerged largely since 2014: yourname.com. In many ways this reminded me of something Scott Rigby said about the banality of using a website to document your own accomplishments when they could be creating new communities and platforms and tools to change cultural practices. It stuck with me and I always felt a little ashamed when I felt myself engaging in a little seandockray.com. That might be part of the reason that for the past few years my homepage has consisted in nothing but this image of Michel Siffrè, trying to learn his own internal time clock in the depths of a Texas cave, passing time, reading Plato.

When I realized that e-rat.org was well and truly gone, I acutely felt the emptiness of maintaining a handful of social media profiles for the enrichment of tech capitalists. The truth is I’ve abandoned social media over the past couple of years and somehow, on the other side, I have found myself starting all over again, building a static website homepage. I was listening to Zen Arcade (more eternal returns) thinking about a domain name to replace the one I’d lost and without much thought I bought somethingilearned.today.

Anyways, here is a great performance of the song by Bob Mould in 2016: