Still Lost

You’re halfway through the night wandering the internet looking for nothing in particular when you find a Chinese restaurant that’s grinding poppy seeds into ramen to make it addictive. An abandoned building rotting in central Tokyo. Someone making art from pills. A video of the Game of Thrones intro but every time it cuts to a new location someone’s eating soup. These are the things that happen when you let the web pull you wherever it wants to go.

The algorithm didn’t hand you any of this. You just found it, or it found you, and suddenly you’re deep in some stranger’s sketched Tinder matches, a ranking of Simpson’s couch gags, photos of a house built entirely for trees. Kirsten Dunst apparently had to tell everyone that your selfies aren’t your life. Japanese cookbooks have a quality of wrongness to them that you don’t fully understand until you look. PornHub started a record label. It tracks in a way that doesn’t make sense but also somehow does.

The best part of the internet is the specificity. Someone documented that two thousand lights covered the streets of Hong Kong. Another person built a camera lens from a plastic cup and it actually worked. The web’s where the weird and the mundane coexist without judgment. A guy eating soup in the background of a credits sequence can be important enough to edit together. The stupid particular things. The things that shouldn’t exist but do because someone cared enough.

You end up with seventeen tabs open. Half of it gets bookmarked. The rest disappears into history. You probably won’t click any of it again. Doesn’t matter. You found them. That’s the part that sticks.