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Goodbye, Skype. I’ll never forget you
I spent entire nights in 2011 gabbing on Skype. As it shutters, I’m reminded of a bygone era of online intimacy
Still, I must pour one out for Skype, a place where I would spend whole nights in 2011 gabbing over murky video, a form and era of technology I associate with a spectral, critical, inarticulable valence of intimacy that also feels bygone. If people are talking about Skype these days, it’s probably in relation to the movie Past Lives, which depicted a relationship over several decades and captured that peculiar intimacy in a chapter of intense, inexpressibly important reconnection over video call. For the film’s release in 2023, I wrote about how the writer-director Celine Song’s inclusion of the classic Skype theme music – that interminable and annoyingly peppy sonar into the deep digital abyss – portaled me straight back to 2011, the same year Nora Moon (Greta Lee) began long-distance video-chatting with her childhood sweetheart Hae Sung (Teo Yoo).
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