“Establishing secure connection...” is a website composed of fragments of posts filed under the “missed connections” section of Craigslist. missed connections is a place where the shy, lonely, and atomized go to plead with the universe to grant them just one more chance at connecting with the beautiful stranger they cannot bear to imagine a life without. These desperate, melancholic voices presume that union with the other will make everything okay again. When they post, they’re feeling lucky, to borrow from Google. I’ve mined particularly poetic fragments from missed connections, sourced from the Craigslist branches of random cities. They flood the screen upon page load, as if typed by their authors, each at a randomly generated speed, inevitably overlapping. Yearning is cacophony. If you’re feeling lucky, you can click the button and three fragments will self-select at random to — in the words of the Internet — establish a secure connection in the form of a poem. If you don’t e-mail it to yourself, you lose it forever (think of posterity, don’t make the mistake the authors did). If you don’t like how things turned out, you can always start over. ♡