Semi Permanent

Single hyperlink emails are the web’s version of meme-sharing – sudden, out-of-the-blue gestures of comradeship, and one of my favourite bonding rituals. On May 14, I received one of them:

You prob know this: https://semipermanent.com/. The current version self destructs after 30 days. Gian

That’s it. What a beautiful email. Gian, who sent it, is a master of formats. Earlier this year, he mailed me a handwritten letter on paper that would make Patrick Bateman jealous – finished with a wax seal stamped with his family crest. Gian leaves no detail unchecked, which is why the brevity of the email was deliberate.

As for semipermanent.com, I hadn’t heard of it, but the name alone was enough to make me click. The short description guaranteed I’d remember it the way I remember my childhood friends’ phone numbers.

The site loads with a welcome message reminiscent of childhood video games – soothing, like a cup of tea on a winter evening. But the coziness fades quickly. As a chronically online person, I don’t need yet another manifesto telling me how terrible technology is. Luckily, I noticed a burning fuse icon in the corner and kept reading until I found the final note, left a bit like Steve Jobs’ famous catchphrase “one more thing”:

P.S. The first issue self-destructs in 30 days.

It turns out that Semi Permanent is relaunching as an online magazine where each edition disappears after a month. Perfection. 10/10. A++.

Yes, cynics will say it’s just artificial scarcity, a gimmick. And sure, anyone could download the articles or save them to the Wayback Machine. But I prefer to see it differently – as poetry. In a digital culture obsessed with permanence and efficiency, the act of letting something vanish becomes an invitation to pay closer attention. If you want it afterwards, you’ll need memory and effort.

Death by GPS

We’ve all seen headlines about people driving into rivers while following GPS instructions. It has a name, “Death by GPS,” and its own Wikipedia page. The death toll is likely in the same ballpark as death by coconuts or laughter – negligible compared to shark attacks. Still, blindly following a device into the River Styx offers a neat metaphor for how we often use technology: instead of stimulating memory and curiosity, we outsource our virtues to machines.

Studies have shown just how much our memory hollows out when we lean on technology too heavily. One experiment in the early 2010s found that people who relied on GPS for wayfinding struggled to build the same internal map of their surroundings as those who navigated without it – outsourcing not just the route but the sense of place itself. 

A few years later, psychologist Linda Henkel discovered something similar with photography: when we snap a picture of an object at a museum, we actually encode less of it in memory than if we’d only looked. And more recent experiments have shown that when information is just a Google search away, our brains adapt by remembering less of the fact itself and more of where to find it. 

Convenience, it turns out, comes at a cost. The easier something is to capture on a device, the easier it becomes to forget. For brands, this offers a lesson: maybe step back from the growth-hacking mindset that uses cookies and retargeting to cling to attention. If you make yourself too easy to remember, you also make yourself easy to forget. 

Internet Phone Book

When we were creating the first edition of the Internet Phone Book – a 2025 publication exploring the web featuring essays as well as a directory with the personal websites of hundreds of designers, developers, writers, curators and educators – we decided we would only write to people when we had something meaningful to share.

It was our first print project and took us a long time to complete, so people only heard from us when the book was finally ready – one year after they had submitted their websites for the directory. This caused confusion for many who had forgotten about the project, but some remembered, and within a single day, we were sold out.

We reprinted more books four months later, sending only our second email ever to our mailing list of roughly 3,000 subscribers – and sold another 500 copies within 24 hours. We could probably have done more to remind people about us, but maybe it’s worth focusing on creating things people don’t forget.

Everything that lives dies

My five-year-old son, quoting his grandfather, likes to say, “Everything that lives dies.” A more direct way of putting the title of Craig Mod’s recent book: Things Become Other Things. Healthy ecosystems require both blossoming and decay.

That’s also what attracts me to the disappearing issues of Semi Permanent. Too many cultural creators obsess over personal longevity and legacy. What matters just as much is striking the balance between preservation and renewal – keeping a creative spirit alive across generations and communities.

Net.art makes this clear. Preserving the works of the 90s is valuable, but so is preserving the ethos of open, collaborative, anti-institutional experimentation. What excites me isn’t a single website or magazine but the act of ongoing reinvention.

The internet doesn’t remember. People remember, and they carry those fragments forward – holding them in their heads and hearts, and sometimes sharing them at just the right moment. Ideally, as a single hyperlink email.