Ep. 6 Searching for Digital Traces

guys on a site called techno for us? Yes, we were on that too. What was your I don't remember anymore. I wish I could tell you. Did Emory have one? Did? Yeah? She did. I was hearing from people about Emory, but I really wanted to find something from her directly. Some digital trace from I Heearts, Michaels go to a a podcast network, Vice and Elias Studios. This is Party Cruise, the untold story.

I'm Jenisamoca. I've already taken you through what a party was like, talked about how we were policed, and now I'm going to show you our digital reality. Because this era in the New Millennium would change the game for all future partying. This was when how you showed up online started to become as important as how you showed up in person. And though we weren't doing it on purpose, we were showing our lives uncensored and on our own terms.

The website that I talked about with Alejandra Techno four dot us or T four for short, because an early two thousands social media site that was basically a giant party. It was just a way to connect with everybody. It was basically like a message board for party people. You know your flyers or messaging. There was no swifting in social media back then. There was Techno four data. It was mostly Latin X teens living in LA messaging each other on T four and the profiles were chaotic, filled

up with colorful funds than wacky spellings. The pages were plastered with tons of pictures the crews holding up their badges and girls doing que poses. It's how we chose to stand out and get creative. I know this because I was a member too profile name West Coast's Finest Mommy. I think I was like fourteen when I jumped into my first chat room. I was amazed at how far

I was able to reach people in different states. Other than visiting my family in Peru and New Jersey, I didn't really get to know other places, and by chatting with different people, I was able to learn a lot. I had a penpal, some white girl in Montana. I also had a different penpal, a kid my age that lived on a reservation in Arizona. I met them in Yahoo chats. That's just to say how much I was starting to live on the Internet, and I wonder if for Emory it was like that too. I was curious

and I felt like there were no limits. Amazingly, T four is still around, so last year I decided to check it out to see what I could find. I haven't been on there in oof sixteen years. Okay, i'm recording. I made it to the Techno for Us homepage, which was still active. It's still black and blue like I remember, and I wanted to see if I could find Emory's old profile. Okay, I'm to see you, Emory. Let's try Tears.

Let's try it. Let's try for you. On T four, people use their party crew nicknames, so I started with Emory's nickname Tears, and then we can try Tears with a z or tears tears of a clown. All right, this is not hers. I've never worked on a story like this that brings so many personal memories. I'll tripe in Vicious. Oh, here's a vicious Cherry. This is Cherry. I typed in Vicious because of Emory's crew, the Vicious Ladies, and I found the main head, Cherry. Cherry's profile picture

has the Vicious Lady's logo on it. It's a sparkly pink and white Louis Vitan LV logo that sits on top of the words vicious Ladies. I read what she wrote about the Vicious Ladies on her profile at nothing but a vicious thing repping them. Also fine, vicious ladies. If you were part of a crew, you wrapped it hard. This would be the one and only fame malicious rapping for nothing but the best vicious and then vicious ladies.

Here we go. You got in contact with none other than did see screaming Vicious ladies to the fullest, like to party and have fun and just chill. Finally, I found a picture of Emory Ry Go Destiny and Emery Rocks all the boys all day, every day. There's a picture of m Emery and her friend Destiny. Destiny's page shows that she last logged on in the summer of two thousand and six, a few months after Emory's death.

All Right, Amory Mounos forever in her hearts. It's a tight shot of Emory and Destiny's faces, so it looks like a selfie, maybe with a phone or a digital camera. The lights above the girls are giant luorescent rectangles, the kind you see in an office or in school. They probably took the picture in class. Okay, so I'm gonna save this picture one sec Destiny t four save. We were unable to talk to any Vicious Ladies party crew members. We did reach out to them, they either didn't respond

or declined to be interviewed. One told us through a friend that it wouldn't be of any use to talk to us. They did press right after Emory's death, and her case is still unsolved. So going through these profiles feels like the closest I got to understanding the Vicious Lady's dynamics, just like my crew. The Lustful Ladies. They gave each other shout outs, posted pictures of their friends, and wrapped their crew to the fullest. In the end, I couldn't find anything from Emory directly, but it did

take me back to that time. That world tfor feels like this digital ghost town, like this online version of POMPEII. All these profiles were frozen in time, capturing this new era of the Internet where we could express ourselves online without supervision. And it was like that for me too, until it wasn't. My first long term relationship was with a high school boy I connected with online, but the

relationship wasn't exactly what I expected. Once upon a time, I worked it in and out in the city of Industry, and I remember one day my boyfriend and I had gone into a fight. I don't really remember about what, and he just showed up at my job. He wanted to make up or something like that. But when he walked up, I was chatting with my male coworker, and

my coworker made a joke and I laughed. It was very normal, and my boyfriend saw me laugh, he made a face and he just turned around and stormed out, and I got really stressed out. From the very beginning, my boyfriend was really possessive. He didn't really want me to have guy friends. Or even girlfriends who he felt got in the way. He would call me at all times to make sure he knew what I was doing, and if I wasn't paying attention to my phone, I'd

come back to it and have thirty missed calls. He was controlling about everything, including money, like he asked me to co sign his car lease. I started to get afraid of what he would do with all the information about me sharing the story. I find myself getting protective over my younger self and over all the other women

that I found themselves in my position. It was really embarrassing in the cycle I couldn't break at the time, I was scared that he would see a compliment someone left on my MySpace page or a photo of me with a guy on my T four profile, and we'd have more fights, which could lead to a full day

of crying. So one day in two thousand and six, I sat down, holed up all my profiles, my Space, Facebook techno for us, and one by one I deleted everything, all my photos, my posts, my friends, my party crew years we're gone looking back now, those are the memories I wish I had. As I was looking for traces of Emery on Techno for Us I realized that maybe I could also find traces of that time in my

life online. That's after the break. I do have a few images that I printed out and stored in an album, but otherwise the only pictures I have from that time are with family, pictures with friends at school, and that giant portrait my parents have of me in their living room from my Kensaneta. It's like the good immigrant daughter version of me has survived, enshrined at my parents place. But this other, curious and more complex person I was

growing up is mostly gone. But maybe somewhere in the Techno for Us Digital POMPEII, there is something from my past I can find. And if there's one person who could help me, it would be this man. How do you explain you know, a Facebook before there was a Facebook, MySpace before there was a MySpace. You know, this was very la This is just very la, very teen centering. This is Regal Rojas. He's the actual founder of Techno for Us. For me, this is as big as meeting

Tom from my space. I actually can't log on to my old T four profile. I don't remember the password and don't have access to the old email address, so I was hoping Rigo could help me access it again, but first I had so many questions for him. I was honestly shocked when I found out that he was Latino and from la because nowadays I feel like it's rare that a social network be tailored to a specific community and founded by a member of that community. The

site wasn't anything fancy. The idea was that you could connect virtually with people you met at parties in real life. It was just a profile with messaging. That's really it. And the theme evolved on its own to where, you know, she went to a party and you wanted to connect with some of the people that were at that party or there, or that are going to be at the next one. Just use technical But it was never Rego's plan to make a social media site. He kind of

stumbled on it. Oh your home is very lovely, Thank you, a lot of effort, disorganized, there's water, anything else you may want, it's available. Rego in a family, came from El Salvador when he was eight years old. In the eighties, he settled in the North Hollywood area. In the mid nineties, Rego became a student at Kelsey University Northridge, not far from where he lived. He was a kind of studies major.

I was working in music right as a hobby. And you know, there's new software coming out, new new devices, samplers, synthesizers, and you become very good at it, connecting to think the machines, and you become the technical guy in new Google Friends. This is in the late nineties, right, the Internet bubble is it's you know, it's building up and

people are excited about things. Regal was on the Internet in the time of dial up connection, when images took forever to load, no tweets, none of that ease and lightning speed were used to now. But he still found a way to communicate message. Sports were popular, right, So I followed one the power Tools music board. Right here you go, Ladies and gentlemen, bad Boy Bill, Hot Mix number fourteen, It's power Tools riding on Power six, Humpty

Vision the Rock. Like many young Angelinos at that time, he tuned into this radio show called the power Tools Mix Show on Power one oh six, lots of house techno and EDMA. I'll be in the mix up next, Humpty Vision, bad Boy Bill in the mix all night long, riding on power Tools boys. They also had a message board where people would discuss and learn about new music. Was that your first time kind of seeing that interaction with different people and not the same physical space, you know?

It showed me that people can be very passionate about something. The audience can communicate with each other and have a voice in how to interpret the music. So he had an idea. He and his DJ friends realized we needed a website to promote our music. Rigo had an interest in music and tech, and he wanted to know if he can make a website himself. In March of two thousand and three, five months before my space launched, he purchased the domain name techno four dot us. He paid

seventy five dollars for two years. Then he spent the next three months building the site. What was your visual design idea for the website? UM? I wanted a dark site with a bright contrasting color. Right, so it's black and the brighter blue, sort of like that Dodger Blue. Members didn't have to put any information except asl age, sex, location my favorite thing though, So that's where a lot

of them could customize their their profiles. Again, a very amateur mistake was I didn't take away their ability to inject code. So it was a mistake that worked out in my favor because now people wanted to change their code. We could customize our profiles any way we wanted. Imagine if you can change the colors of your profile page on Instagram or have your favorite songue play when someone

visits your profile. That's what T four was like. So I'm creating this site by myself writing code, but there's no point to it. There's no audience to it. By the summer of two thousand and three, the site is live, but it still didn't have an audience. Rego was trying to figure out how to promote it and seeing you know the power Tools message board, is like, well can I be that? Can I create that? Oh? Can I

make it better? One promotion idea he had, and this is how you know it was early Internet, was to tell people about the website at a party in person. He had a friend that printed flyers like party flyers, and he put t four on one of them as a favorite Arigo. So in July of two thousand and three, Rigo attended the party and it wasn't like the parties that played house music that he was used to. This is in south central LA. It's a backyard party on

a Friday night, summer night, and then gets hot. You know, and people who are listening to loud New right, they're teenagers, they're high school kids. Rego was new to this generation of flyer parties. We know they're wearing these these tags, these these laminated tags with their crew name and their name. You know, kids stands into right and hip hop. But I'm here trying to promote a techno site, right, So

I'm like, like, is this gonna work? Maybe at the end of the party, the DJ would play a little house music, a little electronic music, but it wasn't about that.

It was definitely just hip hop were dominant. The fact that Rigo bought I'm promoted your al called techno for us, just for it to become the social media site for kids like me who liked hip hop, and it's just so funny to me and also such a marker and time for me as an Angelino and the millennial, a time when the popular music among the youth shifted and a time when our world became more digital and interconnected. Slowly, T four started to spread in the party crew scene.

You see the logos on flyers, and people were curious. So it drove some traffic to the site, but the site would really get attention when Rigo began attending the parties with his camera. People are happy to post for their pictures and they started asking you, hey, take my picture. He'd select around fifty pictures from the party and post them on the site a few days later. Girls wearing matching outfits, guys showing off their badges. People start asking, hey,

where are the pictures. I'm like, okay, hold on, let me let me work on them. So, you know, you pick out the best ones, you edit them, and you put them up and the pictures start being shared everywhere, right, and the membership starts going up. People were always looking for a good picture, whether it was to upgrade their profile pictures or just save them at an album. And

Rio could see who wanted to see those pictures. So you start seeing, you know, different plots on the map and it's red hot in La, right, and it's like, wow, this isn't La thing. But wait, there's a group in Texas. How did that happen? Right? So well, people from California have friends in Texas, right, and they share it, they see group of people, they join, and now they start

building community. I was logging on all the time, even at the school library during lunch or last period, just to get onto four and message with my friends online. You get to the point where lau is d blocks the site because the students they're going into the library, they're going into the computer lab, and they're just on the site talking to each other, and we get blocked. Okay, do you know what high school still thought? Every every school high school, we were blocked at the district level.

We can't confirm this, but I remember my Space was blocked at my school by the end of my senior year. What was the moment where you were like, oh shit, this is getting bigger than I thought. Um, when the servers begin to crash because there's just so many people trying to log in. In two thousand and three, the membership went up from fifty to over six hundred. In two thousand and four, the year I joined, an average there were sixteen hundred members online at the same time.

In December two thousand and five, around the time that Emery would have been a member, there was on average over three thousand members online at the same time before peaked at about two thousand and six, two thousand and seven. You know, we're talking about maybe twenty five thousand people a day, you know, four to five thousand people at any moment, and Rigo was making a pretty good living off T four. I never went into my college career

because of T four. Right, so the work I did on T four derailed anything to do with Chicano studies. I was going to be an activist. I thought, let me change the system from within, you know, let me let me go work in immigration services, let me go work in social services. I took one interview in that and I didn't even respond to anything any follow up on that because I was already working on T four. I mean, in a way, you still like maintain the

community aspect of like activists. I mean, I understood what was going on, and I understood, you know, the way that these kids wanted to express themselves and have fun. Rego still keeps Tea for running. He says it costs one hundred dollars a month to keep it going. He keeps it running for himself and for the handful of people that continue to log on. I have a very

tiny platform that has an incredible loyal following. Right, I mean, you go in there now and there's forty five people on I went in there last night there was forty four. There you go, I'm exaggerating. I'm exaggerating, right, I was just I was a little shocked, to be right, you have people that we're at that first party. I can think of one person that was that that first party that's on there actively. It provides a very basic service,

which is people connecting. Right. People will always need to connect to people, and that's why all these social media sites are successful. Our digital footprint will last as long as we wanted to. Our digital footprint will last as long as we want it to. I chose to delete mine in two thousand and six when I did that whole purge I mentioned because of that controlling ex boyfriend. And as I continue getting older, it's hard to reconcile that a lot of us may never get it back.

It feels like such a loss that I can't access my old profile to see if it's even still around. But after talking to Rigo, he does me a favor. He resent my password so I can lug in. So let me lug in let sech. That's after the break. Okay, I found my profile. I recorded myself going through my profile for the first time, and it instantly brought me back to two thousand and four. It's a picture of me. I'm pretty sure I was not eighteen, but I made

myself eighteen at the time. My profile picture was not one of me at a party. It's a picture I have printed out somewhere, but it was still wild to see it online. I'm in high school. This was taken I was probably like seventeen. I think I'm wearing like a sparkly pink rhinestone heart necklace and then wearing Hiphuger pants with a hip Hoger belt that's like a silver

chain with another pink rhinestone to heart. I know I should have kept that belt because apparently I could probably sell it to urban outfitters for like one hundred dollars. So it turns out I still have my profile picture, but I must have deleted my layout when I deleted all my other social media coming my profile was pretty bare. It was just the basic black background with that Dodger blue lettering. But my profile did offer some information. It

says asked for your gender. I have female city. I put role in Heights a member since and it says June twenty seventh, two thousand and four profile hits. I've had twelve thousand, forty eight profile hits and my last log in was July tenth, two thousand and six, at one twenty seven am. The last time I logged in was when I deleted all my other social media profiles. I clicked around the page to see if there was anything else, and I found my journal section. Did I

ever use a journal? Oh my god? How embarrassing. Um, Oh my god, this is so embarrassing. There were three whole entries. Okay, so it's here. The first journal mentry I wrote was July seventeenth, two thousand and four, at five seventeen am. Gosh, and I wrote, m well, it's about five o eight am and I'm up exclamation points tool. I've been thinking about stuff lately. But yeah, damn, it's five to eleven now. Lol. I better get in bed so my mama doesn't get all mad and shish. For now,

I'm out show was. I ended up writing more in that same entry. Damn the drama, Fuck the haters. We gotta just live life, but sometimes you know, I wish there was someone I could come home because the game gets old after a long while. Lol, trust me, then there done that all right? For real? I'm outros. I have no idea what I was, who I was writing about. The game gets hold after a long while, embarrassing. There

was another journal from July twenty eighth, two thousand and four. Okay, I wrote, ah, I finished making the tags and I'm freaking board la la la la, will let's see um nothing. I'm out, lessful ladies leaving this mofo. I think a lot about how easy it is to delete our memories my mask. Clicking or highlighting an entire page of code and pressing one key delete it felt less ceremonial than burning physical images or tossing an entire album with pictures away.

I guess that's why it felt painless at the time. But what I didn't realize was how permanent one click can be. It's more than old photos. Looking through it. T four is really an archive. It's not organized or easily searchable, but you can see firsthand accounts of how we lived. It seems like Emory's profile is gone. She didn't leave a digital footprint behind, at least one that I could find, but I can't help. But wonder did

she delete it herself? What was her reason? Was it a way of protecting herself like I had to, and losing her profile? It isn't just a loss of her photos or her words. It's another missing layer of who she was, what her world looked like, what she felt. Now it's up to other people to fill in the blanks, and I feel an obligation to try because when it comes to subcultures or to communities of color, especially young women of color, historically, it's often up to us to

remind the world that we exist. While I couldn't find anything online that hinted at what happened to Emory, a few months into looking at her case, we met someone who thought he could help Emory's family after hearing them speak and giving me some insights as to what happened. I do believe there's additional investigation that needs to be conducted, and for the first time we hear from Emory's parents, like I said, I was, I wasn't there, you know, like to where I rich I would I was, And

you know she was? She was. She was a happy child, and I know she would cry and saying Where's my dad, Where's my dad? But because I wasn't there, that's next time. This episode was written, reported, and hosted by me Janasamoka. Our show is produced and reported by Sofia Pelissa car Victoria Lejandro, and Kyle Chang and edited by Antonio Seihilo. Additional editing by Carlina Dalbo and Annie Ablis, fact checking by Nadia Bautista, Sound design and original music composition by

Kyle Murdoch. Our supervising producer is Janet Lee. Art by Julie Ruiz and Victuakllon. Our executive producer from Vice Audio is Kate Osborne. Our executive producers from Elias Studios are Antonio Seihido and Leo gi. Our Vice president of Podcasts from Elias Studios is Shana and Naomi Kracso. Special thanks to the UCLA Department of Communication Archives for access to their news collection Party Cruise. The Innsold Story is a production of Elias Studios in Vice Audio in partnership with

Ihearts micro Fuda podcast Network. For more podcasts, listen to the iHeartRadio apps, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows and hey, were you and a party crew? Senator, party flyers or photos, I'd love to see them, Even a voice message about your memories, anything you can send us a message or a picture at party cruise at Elias Studios dot com. Support for this podcast is made possible by Gordon and Donna Crawford, who believe that quality

journalism makes Los Angeles a better place to live. This program is made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.