When you start stumbling on the internet, YouTube is banned in your country, and you are too young to completely realize why. It is this rumour or that rumour, a few condemnations echoing in the drawing rooms, and a tsk about protecting the youth. There is always something that needs to be kept out of your reach; for your own safety, of course, the echos whisper back.
You do not know VPN but every old teenager and young adult in your life is using one, and they laugh if you ask them to teach you, more in their surety than at your naivety. So, you search Google for hours to pop open the red-button channel but when it is finally at the tips of your hands, you don't know what to search for. Should you look for the forbidden knowledge that is being denied to you or the joy and words that keep people older than you stubbornly accessing the network—you never see the appeal.
If YouTube were to be banned again, would you go through the stubbornness of installing a VPN and see your favourite people, Jack Edwards who got you through the early 2020s depression, CrashCourse, exurb1a or the lovely vlogs, lo-fi, and music keeping you company as you go through life? Would you stubbornly try to take back and claim what was once yours, albeit how vicariously borrowed?
It just doesn't stop at that—there are blue-icon apps1 in place of YouTube. The same stuff moves at the cost of some pixels. When they ban Tumblr—the centre of all the aesthetics, vibes, pictures, and random knowledge of the internet—it is embarrassing to ask your friends to send you a screenshot instead of a post link because of an inexplicable ban. Even when they take away Urban Dictionary, you have to at (@) them on Twitter to keep up with the discourse. Though when they take down Wattpad, it’s alright—you have grown up anyway. Your drafts still sit there, and you sometimes momentarily think about what happened further in that story.
They're not gone forever in the drudgery of time. Just as your old internet friends are living their lives irrespective of you, your chats and history continuously occupying a space on an internet server somewhere because you're too afraid to delete it. But they're living, and their cat is still named after you even if you haven't talked to them in years.
The apps and sites do come back, but they're never the same, just as you're not the same. So, what's the point of showing yourself in an Eastern European country just so you can look at the empty streets of an old era of your life and, scroll the loud feed just out of an unbreakable habit that has given you anxiety on countless nights.
Why not shift and adapt to the changing turns of winds? Why must you be stubborn and speak through distortion and censorship to continue talking about something so permanent in your life? Are you too young to properly grasp nostalgia, or too INTP?
Your friend declares you need therapy and you think she does, but both of you just reach to finish that book on your bedside. Ironically, it's about censorship and forgetting as well. The universe likes to do that every now and then; that is, it gives you symbols and signs to thematically organize your life and essays.
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It’s a book club book, but it's not your first Milan Kundera. You read the Unbearable Lightness of Being last summer (or was that the summer ten years ago) in your college library, a cooler making noise through the humidity and the low humdrum of life around you. A junior asks you what to read from the shelf—probably because she saw you rustling through the section half an hour before—you know exactly where the book they are looking for is.
Life is still good because you know your purpose. You squeeze in reading the book during your course readings, taking it back and forth from college and home. Your sister borrows it too, and you two talk about fickle love in the Eastern Europe streets. It is beautiful and confusing, and you're still not sure if the beauty cancels out the sin. The Greeks wouldn't have hesitated apparently, and neither does the author apologize. I will not as well, but I hope you forgive me for writing this all out.
You read the second Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, this summer. And like all great stories, it starts with an urban myth too—“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” You know things will be lost and forgotten in time; voices and textures of people once as alive as the sunshine would merely be the dust you can never touch.
The quote is read in a hundred different ways, but doesn't it also say that the fight to oppose power is as futile as the fight to not forget—they’ll prevail regardless? But humans are stubborn, and this essay is proof of that as well.
Just as the small ‘space’ in the forbidden landscape of Twitter is being used as the discussion down for this small yet loud and caring book club, people who dare to brave through the censorship and evade VPNs to just talk about the human spirit, words, and views. It’s a beautiful manifestation of the book of the month itself.
You start with clicking a link. A greeting and a quote from the book when he comes on to give a puzzle piece of history that beautifully integrates with the book and themes, something personal and important. You talk about letters while she talks about her mother. It goes on till the hour runs out.
That's the usual script, yes, but two people are getting disconnected—not the same two—but they are shifting VPNs and restarting the apps to simply talk about revolutionary laughter and how they won't let an invisible big brother from encroaching on their space, even on the failing and under-debt servers of a white man in the Silicon Valley.
It rains a lot when you fall asleep that night. The seasons haven't changed yet.
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