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.

Ruby Thelot is an artist, cyberethnographer and designed based in New York. He is an adjunct professor of Design and Media Theory at NYU. He is the author of “Stonemilker” (Nueoi Press, 2022). His writing has been published in magazines, academic and literary journals internationally.

You can reach him at ruby@asterisques.com

Digital printed on 80lb matte text / 100lb matte cover
Spiral bound by hand
185 pages
Published 2023