Ninety Megabytes of Everything
The entire compressed archive of The Pirate Bay reportedly fits in ninety megabytes—the whole edifice, every torrent link, the monument that had given media lawyers years of expensive grievances, small enough to carry in your coat pocket. I found this out that week and couldn’t stop turning it over. I considered downloading it. I briefly considered memorizing it.
That was the register of that stretch of days: absurdist, crude, slightly feverish. My brain was running on: eating contest charity formats where you stuff yourself sick and the entry fees go to food banks, a moral symmetry I find genuinely elegant; the notion of breaking into a girls’ boarding school at night wearing a blonde wig, which I’ll leave there because that’s the whole image; something circulating online of a person collecting menstrual blood in mason jars toward the long-term goal of filling a swimming pool, which is either performance art or the most committed long game I’ve ever encountered; a real-world Cartman lookalike photographed with the full physical authority of the character, unsettling in a way I couldn’t quite articulate; Rebecca Black’s Friday turning one year old, which the internet was marking with something approaching genuine reverence—fair enough, honestly. Kevin Smith’s Comic Book Men had just premiered on AMC, a show exactly as described by its title, aimed squarely at people like me. Macaulay Culkin was photographed that week looking spectacularly hollowed out, the kind of image that makes you want to slide him a sandwich under the door.
Israeli researchers had published a study finding that teenagers who kept personal blogs were measurably more emotionally stable and socially competent than those who didn’t. The internet—for all the ongoing legislation trying to break it—turns out to be good for you if you’re actually using it to make something.