PsychoExGirlfriend.com

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

~ the eulogy ~

The front page explained itself in six sentences and never changed them. "As the story goes, I dated this older woman for about 8 months. We were pretty serious but had some communication issues. Well, as you'll see, she had no problem communicating her feelings." Then the number: "When she leaves you in excess of 50 psychotic voicemails, it makes it even harder. So, lets have some fun getting over her by starting a web site. I hope you enjoy my personal pain as much as my friends have. -Mark"

Mark McElwain registered the domain on 15 February 2001 and had the recordings up by March, converted from his answering machine into MP3s and listed on a page with nothing else on it. Each one ran between forty-five seconds and two minutes. Within weeks it was being passed around by email at a volume the web had barely seen for something with no company behind it, Steve Baldwin later calling it the most viewed non-commercial site up to that point. Newsweek interviewed him. Good Morning America booked him. He was, briefly, the most looked-for man on the internet, for having published somebody else's worst half hour.

That last part was argued about at the time and the arguing is most of what makes the site historically interesting. The voicemails were real audio of a real person in real distress, put online without her knowledge by the one person she had been talking to. Half the coverage treated it as comedy and half treated it as a new category of harm, and the site itself solved the problem by giving her a nickname and a dedicated page, which is a solution only if you are the one holding the tapes.

~ the dossier ~

~ the hoax week ~

On 30 March 2001, within days of the site going national, somebody read the source code. The post went up on MetaFilter under the title "Psycho ex-girlfriend is a hoax!" and the evidence was technical: the page would sit idle for a while and then start opening advertising windows, timed so that the countdown only began once you had clicked away, which meant visitors would blame whatever site they landed on next. The whois record gave a street called anystreet in Dallas, Texas, and a phone number of 214.555.1212, which is the number screenwriters use.

Salon ran the accusation about a week after running the original story, and traced the pop-up inventory to the ad network L90. The counter-argument on MetaFilter the same morning was reasonable too. Advertising on a site with that much traffic only proves somebody is selling ads, and people falsify domain registrations for privacy all the time. Going on network television in person is also a lot of work for a pop-up campaign. The question was never settled. It has been sitting unresolved for twenty-five years, which in practice means the recordings were either a betrayal or a performance and the web has never decided which.

~ the store ~

The navigation bar is the giveaway for what the site became after the first month. Alongside the voicemails there was a message board, a FAQ, a page of faster-loading versions for people on slow connections, a section asking "Is your girlfriend psycho?", greeting cards you could send to your own ex, and a t-shirt store running on CafePress. The merchandise eventually came down after CafePress received complaints about the nature of the thing being sold.

By 2002 the front page was carrying a long classified ad for a friend looking for IT security work, with his resume pasted in full under the voicemail links. A site built on fifty audio files has nothing to update, so what fills the space afterward is whatever the owner has lying around.

~ how it went quiet ~

There is no closing announcement anywhere. The archive shows the same page at the same 7,995 bytes from the fall of 2002 straight through 26 July 2003, with its last dated news item from April 2002. On 3 August 2003 the crawler got a redirect instead of a page, and the same on 7 August, and after that nothing at all for almost five years, until a parking stub appeared in May 2008. When Steve Baldwin went looking in May 2004 he found "little Web matter beyond several hundred broken links" where it had stood, and no trace of McElwain either.

In 2001 I was seventeen and on a dial-up line in Turkey, and a website whose entire content was fifty MP3 files was a serious proposition rather than a casual click. You picked two or three and went to do something else while they came down. The whole phenomenon was in English, in American idiom, built on the assumption that the joke carried over a telephone line, and most of what made it a scandal in the United States simply did not translate on arrival. What did travel was the format. Somebody puts a private recording on a public server, the internet listens, and the question of whether anyone asked the person on the tape stays open until everyone gets bored.

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