Abstract
This article examines the interface, power structure, and media technology of the digital platforms that have enabled the production and dissemination of Chinese internet classicist poetry, born in the late 1990s, as well as the impact that technological evolution bears on its aesthetics, economics, and ecosystem. The rapid transformations of Chinese cyberspace make it a digital sand beach in which the poets write. This situation creates a curious paradox: while the internet is supposed to “remember forever” words indifferently, the death of platforms and digital censorship can also erase words thoroughly and forever. On the digital sands thus arises a phantasm of literary immortality, which, in ways unprecedented in human history, is conjured by capital, technology, and political authority.
