Facial Recognition -
I rolled the dice yesterday and put a current photo of myself into one of those "face search engines". You probably know the one, but I don't really want to link to it from here.
It immediately found some old pictures of me from 15 or so years ago, back in my art school days, and some photos that I guess are on a wedding photographer's website somewhere (I didn't want to pay to see the full URLs but I recognized the outfit hehe). I definitely do NOT look the same as I did 15 years ago. My hairline has uhh receded a (lotta) bit, and I've put on about forty pounds in ways that I have found both desirable and sometimes less so 🍔 🍔 🍔
I hadn't really seen any pictures of myself from college in a long while. The photos I thought would last forever on Facebook have slowly disappeared as people I knew during the time have deactivated and deleted their accounts. It was a pretty weird experience, one that I would compare to those videos of Gen-Xers using that teenager filter on TikTok and bursting into tears a few months back.
Watching the parts of the internet I used to inhabit slowly decay has activated archival instincts that I previously rejected. The impending doom of platforms like Bandcamp (SUPPORT BANDCAMP UNITED), and the distant memory of the sudden disappearances of archives like whatcd and even mp3.com (c. 2005) prove a need for a more decentralized approach to the online archive. A single organization can be taken out by a lawsuit (the Internet Archive is practically begging for it) or a buyout (thanks EPIC). We need a more resilient approach or we risk losing important and/or alternative records of our culture over the last few decades.
