Permanent Record

Found it on KaZaA while downloading music, sometime in the early 2000s. Some girl’s sex tape. Libby Hoeller. She’d broken up with her boyfriend in D.C., he got angry, and since he had this video of her from when they were dating, he figured why not push it onto every P2P network he could reach. Standard revenge plot. The internet just made it frictionless—a couple hours and it’s on thousands of computers.

The thing that actually got to me wasn’t the revenge itself. That’s just basic human pettiness. It’s the way the internet doesn’t forget. Doesn’t forgive. Doesn’t move on. If you Google her now, that’s what you find. Not her life after, not who she became, just that moment, permanent and searchable forever.

I participated in that. Everyone I knew did. Just by clicking, by passing the information along, by being part of the network that keeps the thing alive. The cruelty becomes structural. The humiliation becomes permanent. And there’s no way out of it once it’s out there. That’s the actually new part about the internet back then—not the malice itself, which is old. The scale. The irreversibility. The fact that it never actually stops moving.