WHAT YOU ALLOW

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I was looking at this site. https://sinceyouarrived.world/taken. I suspect it’s gathering training data of course (so didn’t rush to it) BUT I love their dryly witty text describing what information you gave away when you browse. So in a fit of inspiration I took one bit from mine and have extended it to a short piece of humorous but sad scifi about aging and life, as seen through my browsing information written like they write. It’s partly autobiographical but also satirical.

Enjoy.

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Your browser accepts cookies. Websites can write small files to your device that persist after you leave, files that identify you when you return, that follow you across sites, that remember what you looked at, what you almost bought, and how long you hesitated. You hesitated for forty-three seconds on a rather funky but gauche jacket you did not buy. You will think about it again on Thursday, but you will not buy it on Thursday either because It will sell out before you decide, which will resolve the question in a way that feels, briefly, like fate, and which is in fact just the market, doing what the market does, which is to say, not thinking about you at all. The jacket would not have looked like the picture anyway as nothing on Chinese shopping apps look like the picture at this point. Well, apart from the dead crow tree decoration and tree poop straps they recommended to you. by the way, this also includes you, the holiday you took in 2019, and the concept of a pension.

We have not written one, but your browser would let this page write up to 1000 MB to your device, a private room, ours alone, like the one given to every site you visit. We left it empty, but most pages don’t, they move in immediately, redecorate, install a small but committed surveillance apparatus, and behave as though the leasehold was always theirs. You have grown used to this so you no longer check, indeed you no longer check a lot of things. This is called equanimity by people who want to be kind about it and called giving up by people who are being accurate, and it has the additional advantage of requiring no equipment.

You prefer dark interfaces, your operating system told us, the way operating systems tell everyone everything, cheerfully, in the manner of a small dog that has found something dead and wants you to be proud. Dark mode is one of the few preferences you hold that costs nothing and causes no one any inconvenience, which puts it in a fairly small category along with your taste in pants and your refusal to use the word “journey” outside of its original meaning. You spend a great deal of time looking at screens, enough that the default brightness became a mild form of hostility, something to be corrected. Whether this is an aesthetic preference or an early symptom is a question you have not put to a doctor, because putting it to a doctor would require booking an appointment, and booking an appointment would require confronting several other things you have been meaning to mention while you’re there, and that list has been growing for some time and is now long enough to be its own problem, possibly its own appointment, possibly its own consultant. It is one of perhaps four settings in your life that are exactly right. The other three are the temperature you keep the shower, the side of the bed you sleep on now that there is no longer any negotiation about it, and a particular volume level on your headphones that you sometimes cannot quite find again and spend several minutes adjusting, which is more upsetting than it should be, and which has recently been complicated by the fact that one ear is slightly less reliable than it used to be. You have not mentioned this to anyone. The ear, sensing this, has not mentioned it back.

You have not enabled Do Not Track which is the default. It means either that you chose not to, that you did not know it existed, or that you know it makes no difference. The third is most likely. Do Not Track is a polite request, in the sense that asking a hurricane to keep it down is a polite request. You have arrived at a position of informed resignation which you would describe, if pressed, as pragmatism, and which is in fact a kind of grief, not the grief of loss but the grief of having understood something clearly and found no use for the understanding. You have a lot of this kind of understanding. You are, in this sense, extremely well-stocked, you could open a small shop, but of course, nobody would come, because they have understood the same things, and the shop would close, and you would understand why.

Your browser has 31 tabs open, seven of them you have forgotten the purpose of. They sit there in a quiet row, each representing a former version of yourself with slightly different priorities, like the photographs at a retirement party of someone you only vaguely worked with. One is a recipe you will not make, partly because of the effort involved and partly because one of the ingredients has become, without your quite noticing when, a problem. One is the website of a therapist you looked at eighteen months ago, did not contact, and have not closed, as though leaving it open constitutes a form of engagement with the problem, of course It doesn’t, it constitutes a tab. One tab is a long article about a subject that fascinated you for approximately four days and now produces in you a faint nausea, the specific nausea of having cared briefly and visibly about something that did not last. Two tabs are the same article, opened on different days, which means you forgot you’d already not read it. One tab is the website of a small, expensive menswear company that makes boxer shorts in patterns you would describe, if pressed, as “not too flamboyant.” You have looked at these boxer shorts on and off for several months but you have not bought any. You have begun to suspect that the desire to own them is not, in fact, a desire to own them, but a desire to be the kind of man who would own them, which is a different transaction altogether and one that no website has yet found a way to process. You have started to notice that you forget things. You are choosing to attribute this to busyness, which is what you also attributed it to last time, although you cannot quite remember when that was. You have started to notice that you forget things.

You work hard, this is not a compliment, this is a coping mechanism that has been formatted to look like a virtue, and it has fooled most people including, on the better days, you. You have confused output with okayness for so long that when things are actually fine you tend to feel idle, which makes you anxious, which makes you work, which is why things are never quite fine. The engine requires the fault to run, you have considered addressing this but the consideration was itself a displacement activity. You are aware that you cannot keep this up indefinitely, and that indefinitely is no longer quite the abstract concept it once was, your body having begun to offer a series of editorial notes on the subject, none of them encouraging, several of them audible when you stand up. Right. The notes are unsigned but the handwriting is unmistakable, it is the handwriting of someone who has been employed by you for several decades and has finally begun to file grievances.

You have had two careers, or possibly three, depending on how you count the middle period, which most people, including you, prefer not to count. You have been praised in rooms that later stopped inviting you. You have sat at tables that were subsequently moved. You have given your best thinking to institutions that restructured six months later and emailed you a PDF. The PDF had a logo on it and the logo had clearly been recently updated. The PDF used the word “journey” in a sense that it does not have. These things are not connected and yet they feel connected, in the way that all losses feel connected once you have enough of them to see the shape, the shape being roughly the shape of you, in profile, walking away.

There was a job that should have worked, everyone agreed it should have worked, the consensus that it should have worked is, in retrospect, the most suspicious thing about it, with the possible exception of the away-day. You left, or were left, depending on which version of events you are telling and to whom, and you have told both versions enough times that the truth is now somewhere in the middle, which is to say, inaccessible, mildly radioactive, and surrounded by signage in three languages.

You have been in love three times with full conviction and once with partial conviction that you rounded up to full. The rounding caused problems, the problems caused conversations, the conversations caused a specific kind of silence that moved into the flat and never quite left, even after the other person did. You kept the flat, you repainted one wall, the wall looks fine. You notice it every morning and think about something else immediately, which is itself a kind of noticing, the most expensive kind. You are heavier than you were then, not dramatically. Just enough that certain photographs have become historical documents rather than representations of yourself, which is a loss you have processed by not processing it at all, which is your preferred method and the one with the worst long-term yield, narrowly beating “ignoring it” and “calling it character”.

The one before that you think about differently, at the frequency of a sound you can’t locate, present but not findable, not longing exactly, not regret exactly, more like the mild persistent awareness that somewhere a door exists for which you no longer have a key. You have considered what you would say if you had the key. You would not know what to say, you would probably say “sorry about the wall” and then leave. You were younger then, which meant your hair was thicker and your convictions were thinner, and it is not clear which of these changes has served you better, the hair, probably as the hair never published anything embarrassing. You miss the hair more than you let on, which is to say, you let on about it occasionally, drily, and this is the acceptable public version of a feeling that is not entirely a joke, and is in fact almost entirely not a joke, but the joke costs less.

Other things are drooping or thinning, your hair is migrating south for winter, soon you will be an upside down head with hairy ears and nose, or these things elsewhere are making their way quietly toward the exit without giving notice, the way a guest at a party slips out during a long anecdote, hoping to be missed but not pursued. Your knees have developed opinions. Your back volunteers information in the mornings that you did not request and cannot use. There is a general renegotiation underway between your body and your expectations of it, and your body is winning, and has always been going to win, and the only surprise is that this is somehow still a surprise. You are, in this respect, a very slow learner, or possibly a very fast hoper, which is the same thing wearing better clothes. You take something for something now, you will probably take something else for something else within the next few years. At a certain point the pill organiser stops being a joke your wife made and becomes a question of genuine logistics, with compartments labelled by day, in a font designed for people who can no longer be trusted with fonts. You are not at that point yet, you have looked at the pill organisers, though, on one of the tabs and they come in seven colours. You spent longer than you would care to admit deciding which colour you would, hypothetically, eventually need.

There is also the matter, since we are being thorough, of the engine that used to start without prompting and now requires, on certain mornings, a brief conversation with itself before anything is decided. This is not a crisis, it is, you have read, normal, which is the most depressing word in the English language, applied here to a department of your life in which you would have preferred to be exceptional. The frequency has changed, the texture has changed, the mental theatre has changed, and now includes, occasionally, an usher. You think about it less than you used to and more than you would like, which would seem mathematically impossible, and is not. There were years in which the question was how to manage the volume of it, and there are now days in which the question is whether the signal was sent at all, or whether it was sent and intercepted, or whether the department has been quietly outsourced without your being told, you suspect the latter and the boxer shorts, you have begun to notice, are part of this. The boxer shorts are an attempt to dress the room for a guest who has not, recently, visited, and may not, you have started to entertain, be coming back, at least not in the same uniform. You do not say this out loud, you do not say a great many things out loud and of course, not one person asks. The boxer shorts say them for you, in a small less gauche pattern, in a drawer, with the tags still on.

You have disappointed people, this is not a confession, everyone has disappointed people, what distinguishes you is the quality of your retrospective understanding of exactly how and why, which is forensically detailed and arrives consistently too late to be useful, like a very good ambulance, dispatched by a very thorough committee, after a meeting.

You have been called difficult and some of those people were right and you know which ones. You have not contacted them to say so because that particular form of honesty is one you perform internally, which produces all of the self-awareness and none of the repair. You are, in this sense, efficient, in the sense that a closed loop is efficient, nothing leaves, nothing enters, the temperature is maintained.

Your friendships have thinned with distance and with time and with the specific attrition of not-quite-getting-round-to-it, which is not cruelty and not indifference but is, functionally, indistinguishable from both, in the way that an extinct species is functionally indistinguishable from one that simply isn’t returning your calls. Serves you right for being so ill and you know no one cares. You have a tab open on that one too. The friendships that remain are the ones built on a sufficient accumulation of shared history that they can survive long silences, which is either a sign of depth or a sign that you have all become too tired for the maintenance, and it is probably both, because things usually are. There are people who know things about you that no current acquaintance knows. This information is now stored only in two places, their memory, which you cannot access, and yours, which is becoming, you have noticed, slightly less reliable as an archive. You are choosing to attribute this to busyness. You mentioned that already. You had forgotten.

There are nights, usually at around eleven, when you think about sending a message to one of them but you do not send it, you open one of the 31 tabs instead, then you close the tab. You have not read the article and you should probably go to sleep. You know what time you need to be up and you know how you will feel if you don’t go now and you stay up anyway, because there is something in the staying up that feels like reclaiming a portion of the day that the day did not give you, even though all you are doing is watching something you are not fully watching on a screen that is too bright, that you then correct to dark, and the correction is one of the four things in your life that is exactly right, and some nights that has to be enough, and is, in the same way that a sandwich at a service station, at three in the morning, in the rain, is a meal.

You are building something. You have been building something for a while, and you believe in the foundation and the foundation is genuinely good. This is not nothing, and most days you know it is not nothing, most days. The building will take longer than you originally planned, which would have been fine at a different point in the timeline, and which is fine now too, you have decided, because the decision to find it fine is the only productive option, and you have always, in the end, found the productive option, and this is either your greatest strength or the thing that has prevented you from stopping long enough to ask whether the building is the right building, on the right plot, in the right century, and it is probably all three, because things usually are.

This page stores nothing on your device. When you close this tab, it forgets you exist. You find this more restful than it should be possible to find a browser notification. You are trying to remember the last time a system simply let you leave without asking if you were sure, without suggesting you might want to reconsider, without offering you three more things before you go, without lighting a small candle in your absence and emailing you a photograph of it, captioned “we miss you”.

634.4 seconds away.

You just switched to another tab, or another app, and came back 634.4 seconds later. The Visibility API named the exact moment you left and the exact moment you returned. Every website you open can read this signal. Most advertising platforms use it to calculate whether you are actually seeing their ads, or just leaving them open in a background tab while you do something else with your one life. Your attention is a commodity and ae just watched it leave the room and we will, soon enough, watch you leave the room, and then the building, and then the postcode, and then the data set. We know from tab 12 that you have selected John Cage’s 4’33” as your funeral music. You find that funny and you have explained why it is funny to several people. Some of them laughed, one of them booked a holiday. We know from tab 15 that you have not yet bought the boxer shorts. We suspect you will not. We suspect, in fact, that the not-buying is the entire point, and that the tab itself is the garment now, worn quietly, in the dark, by a man who is dressing for nobody in particular and noticing, with a small clinical interest, that nobody in particular is the largest audience he has ever had.

You close the tab.

It forgets.

You make a cup of tea.

Something clicks when you stand up. Ah, right.

You open a new tab.

You have 32 tabs open.

You will, in due course, have none.