For the past ten years Frank Warren has been collecting and publishing other people’s anonymous secrets, sent via postcard, on his blog, PostSecret. The stories behind the postcards span the entire spectrum of human drama, from tales of petty revenge to accounts of abuse and severe depression. This richness of experience — along with the secrets’ visual design, by now a recognizable mishmash of Americana, well-executed kitsch, and ironic arts & crafts creations — has kept the site popular through multiple waves of internet fads. Originally a local mail art project in suburban Maryland, the site has spawned several books, including The World of PostSecret (released in November 2014), as well as a play, a TED talk, and numerous live events.
I have a longstanding fascination with the history of the Post, a system of communication based on the competing interests of technology, surveillance, and intimacy. Ever since first visiting PostSecret, it has struck me as a project that builds on and plays with that original postal tension: does sending a postcard bring reader and sender closer together, or stress the distance between them? PostSecret harkens back to the days of handwritten correspondences and epistolary novels, but requires a very modern, digital infrastructure to spread its message of healing-via-sharing. Intrigued by the multiple layers at play in his project, I recently chatted with Frank Warren over the phone about the meaning of secrecy in the age of Snapchat and Whisper, the relation between authenticity and anonymity, and the way he chooses which postcards to publish, having received more than 1,000,000 over the past decade.
We all have a fairly decent idea of what the Post is. What is a secret?
I’ve been collecting secrets for ten years and my definition continually evolves and expands. One way to think of a secret is as dark matter — this stuff that makes up 90%-95% of what’s in the universe but that we can’t see, we can’t sense. The only way we know it’s there is how it affects the behavior of other objects. That’s the definition of a secret I’m living with now.
What happens to that dark matter once it becomes visible through a platform like PostSecret?
Maybe it goes from anti-matter to matter? I think the results of sharing a secret can be transformative. They can change who we are, they can create relationships. They can hurt, they can harm, they can heal. My hope is that when people share a secret with me and the world on a postcard, it’s a first step in a longer journey reconciling with that secret.
Do you ever receive follow-ups or updates from people who had sent you their postcards?
Yes! One follow-up I received was from someone who said that he had made up a story that he thought would make a good PostSecret secret and mailed it in. But then, after I scanned it and posted it on the web, he saw that through the mail process, some of the text that he had put on the postcard had been ripped away. And the secret had a new meaning. He went on to say — that secret that went on to appear on the postcard, on the website, was a true one in his life.
I’ve received another email from a woman who said, “I wrote down six secrets on postcards that I was going to send to you, Frank, but instead I left them on the pillow of my boyfriend as he was sleeping, and I went to work. Later that day, he arrives at my work and asks me to marry him, and I said Yes.”
How do you explain — to yourself — the power generated in the process of creating these postcards?
I think that when you’re speaking about secrets you’re talking about self-revelation. You’re talking about, in some cases, coming out to yourself. I was looking at a postcard today to make a selection for the Sunday Secrets on the website. And I saw one about an hour ago that said “Writing out this secret for the first time and reading it made me realize it wasn’t true.” So our secrets can have very complex relationships with who we are. Sometimes by sharing a secret you confirm it, and sometimes the sharing act in and of itself changes the nature of the secret.
I think that when you’re speaking about secrets you’re talking about self-revelation. You’re talking about, in some cases, coming out to yourself. I was looking at a postcard today to make a selection for the Sunday Secrets on the website. And I saw one about an hour ago that said “Writing out this secret for the first time and reading it made me realize it wasn’t true.” So our secrets can have very complex relationships with who we are. Sometimes by sharing a secret you confirm it, and sometimes the sharing act in and of itself changes the nature of the secret.
We live in a strange moment right now — everybody is extremely concerned about surveillance and privacy, yet at the same time we seem to be compelled to share our innermost, most intimate emotions. How does your project relate to this tension?
You talk about the line between what we decide to reveal versus what we decide to conceal. We’ve always had to make that decision — it’s part of the human condition. I would say, though, that it’s much more of a tension now — now it’s an earthquake, with security, social media, and people presenting an image of themselves for public consumption.
I feel like PostSecret is almost like an anti-Facebook. It’s the true story that you would normally never share in a public arena. But in some ways, the more of ourselves we share online through social media, the less value it has. Sometimes the more we try and project an image of ourselves to others — and perhaps to ourselves — the deeper our secrets can hide from us. And so if we can find the courage to look deep and discover, uncover, and share a vulnerable secret, I think those kinds of stories have the most value of all. Not just to the person who’s confessing, but to the community that can hear it.
You talk about the line between what we decide to reveal versus what we decide to conceal. We’ve always had to make that decision — it’s part of the human condition. I would say, though, that it’s much more of a tension now — now it’s an earthquake, with security, social media, and people presenting an image of themselves for public consumption.
I feel like PostSecret is almost like an anti-Facebook. It’s the true story that you would normally never share in a public arena. But in some ways, the more of ourselves we share online through social media, the less value it has. Sometimes the more we try and project an image of ourselves to others — and perhaps to ourselves — the deeper our secrets can hide from us. And so if we can find the courage to look deep and discover, uncover, and share a vulnerable secret, I think those kinds of stories have the most value of all. Not just to the person who’s confessing, but to the community that can hear it.
by Ben Huberman, Longreads | Read more:
Image: PostSecret
