Found Poetry in Digital Debris
We swim through oceans of text every day. Error messages, notification bubbles, autocorrect failures, spam subject lines, truncated tweets, and the endless scroll of digital communication. We've trained ourselves to parse this debris for meaning, to extract the signal from the noise. But what if we stopped filtering? What if we listened to the accidental poetry that machines and humans create together in our hyperconnected world?
This is an experiment in found poetry - verses discovered in the digital detritus we usually ignore. Each piece below is composed entirely from real digital interactions, rearranged but not rewritten. The line breaks are mine; the words belong to the void.
I. "Your Session Has Expired"
Your session has expired
Please log in again
To continue being yourself
Remember me?
☐ Yes
☐ No
☐ I'm not sure anymore
This page isn't available right now
But we're working on a fix
(We've been working on a fix since 2019)
Error: Human not found
Did you mean: User?
Found in: A cascade of website timeouts during a late-night research spiral
The internet speaks to us in a language of gentle failures. Every expired session is a small death, every login a tiny resurrection. We accept these micro-interruptions as the price of digital existence, but read them closely and they reveal our strange relationship with identity online - constantly proving we are who we claim to be, constantly being forgotten by the very systems designed to know us.
II. "Unsubscribe Symphony"
You're running out of storage
You're running out of time
You're running out of
special offers just for you
URGENT: Account will be suspended
URGENT: Claim your reward
URGENT: Nothing is actually urgent
but the algorithm insists
To unsubscribe, click here
To unsubscribe from existence,
please verify you're human first
Found in: Three days of unopened promotional emails
III. "Autocorrect Confessions"
I meant to say "love"
but it changed to "live"
I meant to say "sorry"
but it changed to "worry"
I meant to say "home"
but it changed to "hope"
Sometimes the phone knows
what I meant
better than I do
Found in: Text message corrections sent immediately after the original
Our devices are constantly rewriting us, suggesting better versions of our thoughts before we've finished thinking them. The gap between what we type and what gets sent contains a strange kind of truth - the machine's interpretation of our intentions, often more revealing than what we meant to say.
IV. "The Void Replies"
DoNotReply@
NoReply@
AutomatedResponse@
SystemGenerated@
This is an automated message
Please do not reply
We cannot hear you
We were never listening
But thank you for reaching out!
Your feedback is important to us!
You are important to us!
(You are user #4,738,293,048)
Found in: Email headers from various services
V. "Connection Lost"
Reconnecting...
Reconnecting...
Reconnecting...
Last seen 3 minutes ago
Last seen yesterday
Last seen
Are you still there?
This message was deleted
This message could not be delivered
But the typing indicator
still pulses
like a digital heartbeat
in an empty room
Found in: Various messaging apps during a power outage
There's a peculiar loneliness in digital communication - the way we can be simultaneously connected to everyone and no one. The typing indicator that never resolves into words. The "seen" receipt that hangs in space like an unanswered question. These small violences of modern communication accumulate into a kind of ambient anxiety we've learned to live with.
VI. "Terms and Conditions"
By continuing, you agree to
everything
and nothing
and the spaces between
Your data will be:
☑ Collected
☑ Protected
☑ Sold to the highest bidder
☑ Used to improve your experience
Click here to accept your fate
Or click here
(Both buttons do the same thing)
Found in: Every website visited in the last 24 hours
VII. "Update Required"
A new version of yourself is available
Would you like to install now?
Installing... 1%
Installing... 1%
Installing... 1%
Some features may be lost
Some memories may be compressed
Some dreams deprecated
Restart required
Restart required
Have you tried turning yourself
off and on again?
Found in: Software update notifications
We live in perpetual beta, constantly updating, constantly patching vulnerabilities we didn't know we had. The language of software updates has become the language of self-improvement - we optimize, we iterate, we push new versions of ourselves into production. But unlike software, we can't roll back to a previous version when things go wrong.
VIII. "Search History Haiku"
how to be happy
how to be happy at work
how to delete search history
Found in: Browser autocomplete suggestions
IX. "The Algorithm Knows"
Based on your recent activity:
You might like sadness
You might like distraction
You might like to feel something
anything
please
Recommended for you:
The same thing you watched yesterday
but from a slightly different angle
People also searched for:
meaning
purpose
why do we
why do we even
Found in: Recommendation engines across multiple platforms
The algorithm sees us more clearly than we see ourselves. It maps our desires through our clicks, our fears through our scrolling patterns, our loneliness through our binge-watching habits. It offers us infinite variations of what we already know we want, creating a mirror maze where every reflection is a targeted advertisement.
X. "Digital Archaeology"
File not found
But the thumbnail remains
like a ghost in the machine
Created: 5 years ago
Modified: 5 years ago
Forgotten: immediately
Do you want to save changes?
Do you want to save anything?
There is nothing to save
Save anyway?
Found in: Old hard drive cleanup
Conclusion: The Poetry of Broken Things
Every day, we collaborate with machines to write a vast, unintentional epic. Our typos become verse, our errors become art, our digital frustrations become a shared human experience. There's something beautiful about the way technology fails us - it fails in such human ways, with messages that sound almost apologetic, almost caring, almost real.
Found poetry in digital debris reminds us that we're not just users or consumers or data points. We're people navigating a strange new world where the boundary between human and machine communication grows thinner every day. In the glitches and gaps, in the error messages and endless updates, we find reflections of our own confusion, our own attempts to connect, our own desperate desire to be understood.
The next time your session expires, your connection drops, or you receive another email from DoNotReply@, pause for a moment. Listen to what the machines are trying to tell you. Sometimes, in their broken language, they speak the most human truths.
What digital debris have you collected? What accidental poetry lives in your inbox, your error logs, your autocorrect failures? The comment section below is temporarily unavailable, but your thoughts are still important to us.