Treasuremytext is a website to which you can send SMSes you receive to create an SMS diary. Each SMS sent (by a member who ticked off “contribute to SMS log in their profile”) is shown briefly on the front page, anonymously, and fascinatingly.

Look at these — of course, they’re the ones people have selected to keep, and ones received by people who agreed to make them public, so it’s not a representative selection of SMSes, but just look: they’re almost all saying “I’m here. I love you.” I subscribed to the feed.

Just finished coaching workshop 3 hrs of coaching 2 night i love it all good
And I REALLY miss you When are you here as would love to meet up for dinner
That makes me sad and I am so sorry it has come to this as you have so much to offer this programme However you must do what is right for you Hope to see you soon as it has been too long since I saw your beautiful smile Still miss you favourite one Take care x
Hi monkey!!…..I miss you….When you think to came here?…..I want to see you!!……Now!!!…..
I promise i will be on my best behavior! Some of the time.
still love everything about you and find you unbelievablaly attractive
not funny just quite hard to know that you like someone so much but you can never be with them
trying to convince myself that there was nothing there but i still find myself thinking about you
night nimet . . . . i miss you
How about sorting that taxi out for next week? For real?
Ok smart arse when you are there then! And then i will fix your issues for you, all of them!
U have beautifull eyes
Dont ring ill b down bout halfpast babes
Me to hes just arrived txt u l8r baby
Nite nite xxx
Nite nite fat sexy bum.Txt u tomoz nite nite xxxx
Im home now baby got a bit of a headache.Wat u up to?
Oh rite i was just wondering thats all.Im gonna go sleep in a minute sexy bum
Ok nite nite sleep well.Luv u to xxxxxxxxxxx
Good morning sexy.Tell ste theres a customer here waiting


Discover more from Jill Walker Rettberg

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

4 thoughts on “treasuremytext

  1. Alan

    Fascninating mixes and ollection of messages… FYI, the link to the main
    site in your post has a “feed://” protocal rather than “http://”

  2. Jill

    Thanks Alan, I fixed that 🙂

  3. Luca

    Fascinating.
    By the way keeping your SMS safe on a diary is quite common (at least here in Italy).
    What is cool here is what about our personal memory? Having logs of everything will change the way we look at our personal history/past?

  4. ben vershbow

    I feel that it would be more interesting if, rather than being a catch-all bin, the logs had some focus. Are you familiar with the City Chromosomes project? These guys are building a networked chronicle of the city of Antwerp, all by SMS. Site: http://www.stadschromosomen.be/

    Just posted about this on if:book – a blog run out of the Institute for the Future of the Book.

    The post can be found here: http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2005/08/treasuremytext.html

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

Screenshot of a paragraph from a New York Times article published May 12, 2026. Text reads: "The price of tomatoes -tart bursts of flavor in salads and sandwiches — surged nearly 40 percent in April from a year ago on a combination of bad weather, high tariffs and climbing transportation costs."
AI STORIES

Genre glitches and unexpected promotional phrases as a sign of AI writing

A genre glitch is a characteristic of LLM-assisted writing where the text suddenly switches genre, typically inserting a short promotional phrase full of sensory details into an informational text. Genre glitches occur when a word in the generated text is heavily associated with a genre or context that is markedly […]

Top of a ransom note from Shinyhunters hacking group. Text reads: "SHINYHUNTERS rooting your systems since '19 ;) ShinyHunters has breached Instructure (again). Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some "security patches"."
Networked Politics University politics

UiB self-hosts the open source version of Canvas, so wasn’t affected by the breach

On May 1st Canvas announced a security breach, and then yesterday the system was hacked. The login page was replaced by a ransom note: if universities don’t pay up by 12 May, student data will be released. Here’s what the login page looked like yesterday: Way back in 2015, when […]

AI and algorithmic culture Networked Politics

AI-generated images, fascist aesthetics: Dieselbrølet and Heimatstrom

My German is pretty dodgy, so when I first saw Heimatstrom on Bluesky, shared by Roland Meyer, a professor of visual culture at Universität Zürich’s Digital Society Initiative, I misinterpreted it and thought it was a far-right campaign. But no, Heimatstrom is a group of left-wing environmentalists using fascist AI […]

Photo of a billboard ad at Oslo S train station showing a smiliing conductor and the text "Du må ikke sove. Joda, bare sov du."
AI STORIES

“Du må ikke sove”: a floating motif detached from its meaning (or: LLMs can write Norwegian but miss cultural references)

There’s a new ad for the train between Stavanger and Oslo in Norway that uses a line from Arnulf Øverland’s famous anti-fascist poem Du må ikke sove (“You must not sleep”). Du må ikke sove, you must not sleep, the ad says. And then it flips it, jovially, joda, bare […]

Academics in Norway: Sign this petition asking for research-based discussions of how to use AI in universities

I just signed a petition calling for Norwegian universities to use research expertise on AI when deciding how to implement it, rather than having decisions be made mostly administratively. ,  If you are a researcher in Norway, please read it and sign it if you agree – and share with anyone else who might be interested. The petition was written by three researchers at UiT: Maria Danielsen (a philosopher who completed her PhD in 2025 on AI and ethics, including discussions of art and working life), Knut Ørke (Norwegian as a second language), and Holger Pötzsch (a professor of media studies with many years of research on digital media, video games, disruption, and working life, among other topics).  This is not about preventing researchers from exploring AI methods in their research. It is about not uncritically accepting the hype that everyone must use AI everywhere without critical reflection. It is about not introducing Copilot as the default option in word processors, or training PhD candidates to believe they will fall behind if they do not use AI when writing articles, without proper academic discussion. Changes like these should be knowledge-based and discussed academically, not merely decided administratively, because they alter the epistemological foundations of research. Maria wrote to me a couple of months ago because she had read my opinion piece in Aftenposten in which I called for a strong brake on the use of language models in knowledge work. She was part of a committee tasked with developing UiT’s AI strategy and was concerned because there was so much hype and so few members of the committee with actual expertise in AI. I fully support the petition. There are probably some good uses for AI in research, but the uncritical, hype-driven insistence that we must simply adopt it everywhere is highly risky. There are many researchers in Norway with strong expertise in AI, language, ethics, working life, and culture. We must make use of this expertise. This is also partly about respect for research in the humanities, social sciences, psychology, and law. Introducing AI at universities and university colleges is not merely a technical issue, and perhaps not even primarily a technical one. It concerns much more: philosophy of science, methodological reflection, epistemology, writing, publishing, the working environment, and more. […]

screenshot of Grammarly - main text in the middle, names of experts on the left with reccomendations and on the right more info about the expert review feature
AI and algorithmic culture Teaching

Grammarly generated fake expert reviews “by” real scholars

Grammarly is a full on AI plagiarism machine now, generating text, citations (often irrelevant), “humanizing” the text to avoid AI checkers and so on. If you’re an author or scholar, they also have been impersonating and offering “feedback” in your name. Until yesterday, when they discontinued the Expert Review feature due to a class action lawsuit. Here are screenshots of how it worked.