I Marie Kondo’d my entire internet presence, one account at a time
I felt less motivated and more discouraged after the COVID-19 crisis. My income was derived from writing Amazon product listings, as well as freelancing and looking for employment. My desire for structure manifested in a fervor for making lists: shopping lists, movie watch lists from IMDB’s top 100, games of the year to play. This was something I indulged in endlessly and vapidly. I placed digital library holds for e-books that I didn’t read and filled digital shopping carts with things I had never bought. I spent hours on Target and Best Buy and Bookshop’s websites, NearlyShopping
None of these plans were followed through. Instead, I felt a vague sense of emptiness while staring at my bank account, and a hollowing dread at the sight of my growing list of entertainment — which had begun to feel more like a list of tasks. As a means of giving myself purpose, I started to collect. But the make-work wasn’t satisfying, and worse, it had left me with a grotesque email inbox, full of steaming piles of advertisements.
The summer of 2021 was a crazy break point. Inboxes in my inbox were difficult to read. I had gotten tired of the everything-is-a-subscription model, and the way that choosing a digital receipt when I bought a Scrub Daddy and a pack of gum at Target meant getting ads twice a week. I was upset at myself for signing up for Mercari in a moment of weakness — secondhand Ganni at that price? — before never perusing the site again. It was exhausting to see the constant specter of it consuming my attention about something I should buy, log into or care about.
That was when I had my first outlandishly antagonistic reaction to an “updated terms” email from a vendor I couldn’t recognize. I scrolled down to the bottom and clicked on unsubscribe. I gleefully checked “I never signed up for these emails” on the following screen. I thought: “Why not delete my account and get rid of myself?” The entire process took about 20 minutes. I couldn’t locate a delete button, so I had to Google it, and then download the app in order to tab over to a settings screen before hitting “delete,” confirming in my inbox, and then deleting the app. After that my profile was completed. Final words vanished — and blessedly, so did the weekly emails.
The beginning of three months would see me slowly and systematically delete as much online as I could. I was compelled to find random online accounts and then delete all trace of my existence from them. I didn’t do it as some kind of stance around privacy — I’m a digital journalist, being visible is part of that — but because I was tired of the being alive of it all, and how much marketing email that entailed. This was a pit I was in, which I knew was impossible to climb out of. But I couldn’t stop.
I didn’t want to stop until I felt some part of me had been redacted, a chapter of life struck out from the archives of online life.
Mostly, it gave me something to do that felt productive — a feeling I sorely lacked, despite working intense hours, writing enough to pay the bills. It was a sort of ritual. It was not an organized effort. The process consisted of checking my inbox to spy an ad or email notification or updating terms and service messages for a social media platform or brand I did not want. I’d move in like a shark scenting blood, and I’d stop when I felt like I had done enough.
Each deletion represented a satisfaction in itself, allowing me to regain some of the attention that I have given away. But the effort to extricate myself wasn’t always easy or satisfying. Many companies make it extremely difficult for you to cancel your account. At its easiest, it meant navigating through obfuscating design to finally locate a “delete” form. At its most frustrating, it meant numerous help desk tickets and phone calls, countless versions of “we’d hate to see you go,” and disputes with my bank.
This became more like a meditation ritual over the years. I’d excavate habits of my past life, then observe with a kind of detached amusement. I came face to face with every random account I thought I’d eventually use, from DePop to Glassdoor. My Skillshare account was once my first. I wanted to learn new skills! A General Assembly account was also available from the time I lived in San Francisco and wanted to work in technology. My Neopets have been hungry for fifteen years. I’d sold so much furniture on Craigslist. In 2016, I went through a strong Pinterest phase that included dyeing my hair blue.
Many of these sites had been well-maintained, such as dragging a rake into a Japanese dry yard, and then being abandoned. For as long as my memory can recall, I have lived online. It was evident that the pandemic has only made things worse. It also made me work through a lodestone of shame for my younger self — sometimes I wanted to obliterate her, in a fit of Kylo-Ren-ass peak. Don’t ever read your old Yelp reviews. They’re bad.
But I underestimated how often I’d also come face to face with memories that meant something to me. My boyfriend and I went to San Diego’s roller skating shop because it had only one pair of his size skates. I’d bought a pair of new wheels, but had never worked up the energy to put them on. This is something that I need to do. The bookshop was where I placed my order. In the Real World, Craft, which I’d logged on my to-read list, and tweeted an image of, but never actually read. I found the name of the cute vendor who sold me my favorite pair of sculptural earrings at a craft fair in 2019 — she’d gently manipulated the wire to suit my face shape, after I tried them on. Many of the accounts or newsletters I retained were for local artisans or shops I really wanted to support.
It was also interesting to look at my old hobbies, and consider trying them out. While not all my hobbies fit perfectly, I found more love for them than I had expected. That didn’t mean I needed to reignite the Wes Anderson phase, or the “flipping Goodwill furniture” phase. I would probably revisit the blue hair, however — it looked pretty good.
Over the years, I stopped deleting accounts. I’d gotten what I needed out of it: My inboxes looked like they’d recovered from a plague. I wasn’t really fastidious — when deleting was too hard, into the spam filter they went. This had to suffice. The side effect of constantly being bombarded with brand newsletters was that my urge to consume was waning. Slowly, my desire to do actual things began to resurface. These wheels were my new fucking skating skates. I drove to Joshua Tree where I finished the book. It was also recorded to Goodreads. However, some bad habits can be hard to break.
It is still difficult to have a good relationship with the internet. This holds especially true of social media. However, it is also true everywhere else. Although I hate email, getting rid of the clutter has allowed me to have some breathing space. Lots of accounts still live on in places I can’t see. Some of that is because I couldn’t find them. A part of this is due to the fact that I actually hid them.
Mostly, I’m glad I attempted to extricate myself from these accounts — even if it was impossible to do so thoroughly. It would simplify all the emails I was dealing with. But it also helped me rediscover some of the things I’d once loved, and gave me space to reignite the hobbies I still really care about.
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