What is a secret?

April 5, 2024 5:53 PM

In the fall of 2004, Frank came up with an idea for a project. After he finished delivering documents for the day, he’d drive through the darkened streets of Washington, D.C., with stacks of self-addressed postcards—three thousand in total. At metro stops, he’d approach strangers. “Hi,” he’d say. “I’m Frank. And I collect secrets.” Some people shrugged him off, or told him they didn’t have any secrets. Surely, Frank thought, those people had the best ones. Others were amused, or intrigued. They took cards and, following instructions he’d left next to the address, decorated them, wrote down secrets they’d never told anyone before, and mailed them back to Frank. All the secrets were anonymous. Initially, Frank received about one hundred postcards back. They told stories of infidelity, longing, abuse. Some were erotic. Some were funny. He displayed them at a local art exhibition and included an anonymous secret of his own. After the exhibition ended, though, the postcards kept coming. By 2024, Frank would have more than a million.

Dark Matter: For twenty years, PostSecret has broadcast suburban America’s hidden truths—and revealed the limits of limitless disclosure.

PostSecret.com

PostSecret on Instagram

PostSecret Live

Podcast episode and transcript: Claire Has a Secret [CW: suicidal ideation]

When Claire was a teenager, she held a lot of big, difficult feelings, and for a while, she saw only one solution for them. Though Claire decides to not act on those feelings, her story gets shared anonymously online — and continues to appear when she needs it most.

TED Talk: Half a Million Secrets

Book: The World of PostSecret

PostSecret previously on MeFi

posted by Rhaomi (16 comments total)

Some of these are silly, some are just, meh, people being people, and some of them are heart-breaking.

The post at the top of the page got me--
When people I love leave a voice mail message on my phone, I always save them in case they die tomorrow, and I have no other way of ever hearing their voice again.

Ouch. Yesterday I went into AT&T because I couldn't get my voice mail set up on my new phone after hours of frustration. The guy pushed a button and said, "Done." He said it was now called visual voicemail and comes in like a text over my phone. "But I wanted to dial up and get my normal VOICE mail." Nope. All gone. It's totally going to be phased out. Even though I was using regular old fashioned voice mail on my old phone right before I activated this one, it's gone. Along with the special messages I wanted to save.

Every time I get a new phone, I lose something I had wanted to keep-- a picture, a game, a voicemail.
The oldest paper book is 1100+ years old, but I can't access things I wrote 30 years ago on a floppy disk. Nothing digital will last.
posted by BlueHorse at 6:32 PM on April 5 [50 favorites]

The voicemail I saved from my Mom got deleted about a year after she died and it really hurt.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 6:55 PM on April 5 [15 favorites]

When people I love leave a voice mail message on my phone, I always save them in case they die tomorrow, and I have no other way of ever hearing their voice again.

I use vonage and get my voicemails emailed to me as MP3s. I save every single message from my mom (in my gmail...maybe i need a better plan).
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 7:22 PM on April 5 [5 favorites]

I'm saving an entire answering machine with a dead friend's messages, and my current landline phone has messages from another. Gotta figure out how to jumper an audio socket into them so I can snarf them out digitally.
posted by rhizome at 7:36 PM on April 5 [2 favorites]

God, I remember when Postsecret launched. It was absolutely huge with my social set. New cards were posted weekly and i absolutely checked every Sunday without fail. It kicked off a huge trend in anonymous confessional culture on college campuses...my university's LJ community did recurring "anoncon" threads that got pretty wild. I remember very well that I posted a confession - that I'd smoked weed with a popular professor, which was true - and a whole thread spawned about whether it was bullshit or not. I was like, man, it's not like I get clout from an anonymous confession, nor would he get in any sort of trouble, why would I lie?
posted by potrzebie at 9:16 PM on April 5 [15 favorites]

God, I remember when Postsecret launched.

I do as well. I remember being very jealous. I had just "finished" (quotes because it's never finished) my own anonymous mailing project, Victory Shag, after running it for almost 5 years. Though I had thousands of subscribers I remember thinking Post Secret was much better, and much simpler, as the creator didn't have to come up with the secrets himself. Creating content was exhausting.

I thought fondly about Post Secret about a year ago but then forgot to check in what happened to it. Thanks for the link.
posted by dobbs at 2:58 AM on April 6 [2 favorites]

Even though I was using regular old fashioned voice mail on my old phone right before I activated this one, it's gone. Along with the special messages I wanted to save.

Never getting a new phone again, check.

(I also do the same thing as the poster though it’s not really a secret).
posted by corb at 4:26 AM on April 6

I read PostSecret for years, but I fell off around the time Google Reader died. Or whatever RSS I used to replace it. I looked in a few years later, wondering if it was still there and being bemused that it was still going.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:47 AM on April 6 [1 favorite]

The only recording I have of my father's voice is the "Hi you've reached [his name]..." I've saved a bunch of calls with my mother since.

Make recordings, save them to disk as .wav files, save backup copies in multiple, offsite locations.

Everything digital dies, but we can try to make it last as long as possible.

We lost all the video tapes with him on them in a storage/mold incident, so physical media is no barrier to loss.
posted by Hactar at 6:24 AM on April 6 [5 favorites]

The oldest paper book is 1100+ years old, but I can't access things I wrote 30 years ago on a floppy disk. Nothing digital will last.

The oldest paper book may be 1100 years old, but how many 1100 year old books survive today? All media needs care (or very good luck) over time to preserve them.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:07 AM on April 6 [6 favorites]

PostSecret was big when I was a teen, and I remember feeling kind of cynical about it. I didn't assume everyone was lying, but it did feel very Dramatic in a way that made me cringe. I think 15 years of Instagram has made this kind of workshopped sharing very commonplace now, to the point where the original project probably would barely register now, but, uh, nope, I just clicked on the PostSecret Instagram and it still makes me cringe.

AT&T people seem particularly cavalier about wiping out information. Last time I switched phone providers (away from ATT) they almost deleted my number, even though I was pretty explicit that I wanted to keep my number and stop using their service.
posted by grandiloquiet at 8:44 AM on April 6 [2 favorites]

(Not sure about on Android, but if you have the Dropbox app installed on an iPhone you can -- from the regular Visual Voicemail screen -- export audio files of individual voicemails directly to a Dropbox account, free or paid. Save your favorite voicemails now so you don't have to stress about it when your phone eventually breaks!)
posted by nobody at 11:08 AM on April 6 [3 favorites]

It kicked off a huge trend in anonymous confessional culture on college campuses

Slightly interesting that Mortified apparently started a couple years before PS? I thought they would be around the same time, but eh, they both came out while I worked at a particular company and that stuff squooshes together in memory. I remember there was also a big trend/supply of "personalzines" at my local zine-selling newsstand, which where more like paper blog (or LJ) posts than anything I can think of.

"Shit My Dad Says" absolutely descended from this scene.
posted by rhizome at 11:52 AM on April 6

iPhone folks: you can store any voicemail in Files/iCloud Drive by tapping the button that looks like a box with an arrow pointing up. this is the button that displays the share sheet, which also has a menu item labeled "Save to Files".
posted by secret about box at 4:19 PM on April 6 [3 favorites]

It was one of those things that for a while was super interesting, but it's now like AskReddit posts, where pretty much everything has been covered already and there's nothing new under the sun.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 7:55 AM on April 7

i've been reading that whole time. the secrets don't really speak to me anymore, not like they used to, but (almost) every sunday i still go to the site and read them.



(i am still angry about the one that said she poisoned her cat so she could talk to the hot vet. that was at least 15 years ago.)
posted by misanthropicsarah at 2:23 PM on April 8 [1 favorite]