Not long after I arrived in Tokyo, I took a job for a small start-up company cleaning abandoned twitter accounts. At the start of a day of work, I was given two spreadsheets: one a list of account names, email addresses, and passwords, the other a list of new account names, email addresses, and passwords. For eight hours a day, once a week, I worked through as many of the items on the list as I could; changing usernames and addresses, and deleting old tweets.
I was never actually told what the accounts were for — I think it was a kind of hush-hush publicity stunt; preparation for a twitter version of War of the Worlds or something — but it didn’t bother me, really; I needed the money, and the work was easy.
In this way, my Monday mornings became a blend of local cafes and scrubbing away at the electronic past. I saw myself as a member of a cleaning company, slowly working through the rooms of an abandoned apartment building, and throwing out what was left.
Logging into a person’s dead account felt like wading into a room still filled with their things. Though most of the accounts were fake — made to look like real people but in fact shells for misinformation and promotion — occasionally I’d find real accounts that once belonged to real people, along with their thoughts and feelings scribbled across the walls of their old electronic homes.
