Paye ta shnek

» see payetashnek.tumblr.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

This one was in French and it was not addressed to me. i am putting it on the site because of what it was structurally, which is a kind of object the web used to produce constantly and now almost never does: one tumblr, one person running it, seven years of other people's words, and then a stop.

Anaïs Bourdet was a graphic designer in Marseille. In 2012 she started a page where women could send her whatever a man had said to them on the street that week, and she posted it as received. No commentary sat around the entries. The title is street slang, pulled directly out of the kind of sentence the site existed to record, which is why it is not translated here.

The format was the argument. A single account of a man shouting something at a woman at a bus stop is an anecdote and can be waved off as one. Fifteen thousand of them stacked in reverse chronological order, all in the same typeface and each one dated, is a dataset. French media understood this fast, and by 2013 the site was being cited in Libération and L'Express as a source rather than as a curiosity.

~ the chronicle ~

~ paye ta everything ~

The template got copied almost immediately, and the copies are the clearest measure of how well it worked. Paye ta robe collected the same thing from women in the legal profession. Paye ta blouse did it for hospital staff. There were versions for the police and for amateur sport, each one a plain feed of quotes from inside an institution that had assured everybody it did not have this problem.

A book came out of it in 2013, crowdfunded first and then picked up by Fayard, who republished it in january 2014 under the site's own title.

~ what really happened ~

It did not run out of material. Bourdet stopped in the last week of june 2019, and she was specific about why. She said she could no longer read the accounts and process them on top of what she was dealing with herself every time she went outside, and that the work had cost her anxiety attacks and depressive episodes. She had been attacked in the street with friends two days before the announcement.

The second reason she gave is the harder one. Testifying was no longer enough, she said, because after seven years nothing had changed. A site whose entire method is accumulation has no answer to that. It can only get bigger.

~ what is still there ~

The tumblr answers. That is why this grave says dormant rather than dead: payetashnek.tumblr.com still returns the full archive, thousands of entries deep and unedited, with nothing added since 2019. Almost everything else on this site was switched off by somebody who owned it. This one is a person who put the reading down and left the shelf up.

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