“Have you ever updated your Flash player? It is so sad. What happens to version 11.4?”-Liz Lemon, crying very hard.The video for Jerome LOL's “Deleted,” directed by Jerome himself, is a crowd-sourced clip that shows the contents of computer's hard drive slowly going away. Set to the Sara Z-assisted freestyle ballad, “Deleted” captures that inexplicable dread that any lonely computer user (that's to say, all of them/us) closely attached to their digitized content, no matter how ephemeral it is, has certainly felt as they think about what they've lost due to hard drive crashes or by way of the simple accidental clearing of the Recycle Bin. Everything that we see here, from cute cat videos to trippy animations to silly animated GIFs takes on an almost elegiac quality now that it's framed with a Finder window titled “Deleted.” All of this stuff will soon be no more. And Sara Z's devastating hook, crooned with a bit of a hurt R&B singer quiver, transfers the very real feelings of heartbreak and shit man, even death, onto a hard drive purge: “We’re offline/ No course of action/ Deleted, deleted/ Hope you got what you needed.” This is the oddly affecting drawn out death of HAL-9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey playing out on your desktop.Bringing this kind of pathos to Internet culture is important, especially in an era when hooked-in intellectuals tend to blindly celebrate the possibilities of the web because “Now, everybody has the Internet,” or think the end is nigh for the minds of young people because, “Now, everybody has the Internet” (D. Watkins' recent essay, “Too Poor For Pop Culture” over at Salon is a healthy reminder that plenty of people exist without the 24-hour online access, by the way). “Deleted” is useful for affording this all-encompassing thing called the Internet some emotion, free from idyllic utopianism or knowing nihilism. The video's imagery floating by one last time suggests a palpable sense of work (and therefore, time, and effort and belief and feeling) about to go away forever. It's a truly dark video – a holocaust of creative expression.For a less harrowing though equally high-concept examination of computer user detritus, there is the video for Holly Herndon's “Chorus,” directed by Akihiko Taniguchi. “Chorus,” Herndon's new single was put together using audio recordings of her computer experience. The “Chorus” video incorporates footage of Herndon at the computer and mixes it with Taniguchi's 3D renderings of real-life workspaces, injecting the ordinary with a dose of uncanny valley surrealism. You're looking at stuff you probably see every day (a coffee cup next to a keyboard; a flipped through volume of Manga) recreated with top-of-the-line special effects, forcing you to stop and reconsider the quotidian. Some crumbled-up trash looks alien when it's been photorealistically recreated. If Jerome LOL's video is about digital abundance and the frightening fragile possibility of it all going away and well, what then, Holly Herndon's video for “Chorus” is about not letting that abundance go to waste. Consider what's going on here a kind of digital sustainability: The same way a mindful butcher attempts to find a use for every piece of the cow, Herndon turns the byproducts of computer usage—the sounds of YouTube, Skype, and mouse clicks—into art.Brandon Soderberg is a carbon-based life form living in Baltimore. He's on Twitter - @notrivia