The Backrooms of the Internet Archive

Like many bits of Internet Culture, this simple image of an empty series of rooms represents a deep-repressed or recently-remembered memory of a common Internet Legend, or it’s just a shot of nothing.

This image floated around message boards in the 2010s, posted with commentary or as a general use for a slightly off-putting photograph of a less-than-well-maintained location, and was, by most standards, rather indistinct. The internet, after all, is filled with odd images and weird drawings that cause a reaction, often after many different attempts to achieve the effect. Survivorship Bias for memes, one might say. So if one more image of an indistinct indoor landscape was out there, not much was going to happen of it.

That changed in 2019, when the image was given a legend and history, made up out of the air, that it was a rare photograph of The Backrooms. The phrasing of the original declaration speaks for itself:

“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you”

Leave a Comment