A Cyberarchaeology of Checkpoints – Ruby Thelot

Checkpoint: My newborn son means everything to me, even if sometimes he’s a little shit and I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in months.

This book is an homage to the innumerable efforts at staving off the ineluctable demise of all digital memories. Specifically, this book focused on Checkpoints, an emergent behavior which occurred in the comment section of a YouTube video from 2012 to 2021. There, the users, when algorithmically recommend the video, would write a “checkpoint,” a personal life update.

This book contains a curated collection of 99 Checkpoints, along with two essays and an interview with Rebane2001, the user who archived the video before its unfortunate deletion by YouTube.

Remember: memory is a radical act.