The other day there was a car chase. A dude in a Raiders jersey was shooting at cops on the freeway. It ended how most chases do: the guy clipping a squad car, slamming into a pole, hopping out, running, failing to jack a truck, then getting tackled to the asphalt, beat the fuck up, and hogtied.
A couple of days later YouTube informed me that a different guy was in a standoff with police near the Compton Creek. The helicopter cameras showed him parked in a truck up against the steep drop down into the LA River Tributary, a militaristic squadron of LAPD parked behind him. He was jamming out to music and huffing on a giant blue tank. I prayed he would gun it down into the river and take off Gosling style. The hero the city deserves. The news channel’s instant replay showed the impressive move that got him to this spot: he maneuvered through 7 cop cars going the wrong direction then swerved across the median, inhaling nitrous the entire time. I watched that standoff for a while until I had to turn it off for a work meeting, as if I didn’t know how it would end.
Today I logged on to YouTube and my suggested video was titled: “GRAPHIC ENDING TO LA POLICE CHASE.” I wanted to watch. Needed more. Somehow, I resisted the urge to click. I think I already know what happened.
This pattern of corporations presenting content regardless of moral implications or mental health ramifications like this is now so blatant and obvious that it’s not a secret or a conspiracy theory but observable fact. If you spend any amount of time engaging with a particular topic, the algorithm will suggest more of it. The companies want our attention and sell our data. We participate in this reckless system willingly because we cannot look away. The more catastrophic and enraging the better. That is why we are staring at our screens.
Today my phone told me my screen time was up some ridiculous percentage last week, for a total of 6 hours per day. (side note: i am in the fantasy basketball finals, so it’s maybe acceptable).
The internet is a bad, bad, occasionally great place, just like the rest of the world, because we have fused with the computers and the internet is no different from the actual world now. It is the same world in which everyone is vying for everyone else’s attention and data and money. Local news car chases are an LA staple, as routine as the rain seems to be now in this drought-addled city-state. But now anyone in the world can watch them on an endless loop, if they happen to get sucked into that particular niche of carnage.
Maybe the internet was always like this but it does feel like at one point it was a little purer. When you would seek out webpages by typing in the URL rather than being redirected from one of a few primary social sites designed to trap you forever. Homestar Runner. Blogs. DatPiff.
On Monday March 13 2023, DatPiff died. Twitter told me about it. I scrolled past numerous eulogies. DatPiff is offline, forever, they said. Music is temporary, they reminded. Everything is temporary, was the lesson. Death comes for all of us, at unexpected times, whether we are humans or a website that hosts mixtapes. We have truly lost our way. Remember the good old days?
I had a lot of emotions about it. I came here to write a eulogy.
When I started writing this article, though, I typed in DatPiff.com just to see what would happen. The site loaded, albeit a bit buggily. There was some Meek Mill project on there that I didn’t and don’t care to download. I checked DatPiff’s Twitter account and they had this to say:
This is good news. But also maybe bad news for DatPiff. When everyone thought they were dead, people talked about the site like a relic from the past. It is, in many senses, a historical artifact of the old internet. Many artists got their breaks by uploading free tapes to the site. And many music fans got a lot of great tapes by perusing their digital vaults.
But discovery and distribution channels shifted, and everything is on streaming now.
But everything is temporary, and streaming won’t last forever. That is a reality that is hard to comprehend, even if we know it’s true, like the fact that social media is rotting our brains and corroding society. We can’t stop using streaming services because they are the best and most convenient option right now. Even if they rip off artists. Even if they are designed the same way the addictive social media platforms are.
I will spare my eulogy for DatPiff because DatPiff isn’t dead and I haven’t used it in years. I’m sure many people do still use it. I used to love it. I used to download albums from blogs. Keep close track of my digital music collection. I used to not be able to pull whatever song I wanted out of my pocket at any moment.
The same old internet is out there, we just don’t use it because the new one won’t let us look away. We already know this, but the DatPiff death hoax really reminded me of it. I don’t think the right answer is to go back to using sites that we used to use, but it does feel like we’re reaching some sort of point where the way we use the internet needs to change before we destroy ourselves. Or maybe I only think that way because I scroll through Twitter too much and listen to other people who have the same sort of viewpoints. Who knows.
I suppose the best way to end this article would be to compare DatPiff to a car chase. We all took a moment to watch it perish in a horrific crash. But then we realized it actually got out of the car, ran away, and disappeared into a building. And the cops drove off, like our attention, somewhere else.
So DatPiff will still be there tomorrow. If you really missed it during the few hours it was gone, hopefully you’ll be there to keep it going. If you, like me, were just using its faux death as a way to lament about the current state of the internet, while reminiscing about the good old days and pining for a purer future, hopefully this article just reaffirmed your beliefs like everything on the internet is supposed to do.
Like everything else on the internet, it may have been a waste of time.