And even though the internet has become the de facto record of recent society’s activities, there is no one with the dedicated role of helping maintain and preserve these records. Already, the problem known as link rot is beginning to affect everyone from the Harvard Law Review, where, according to Jonathan Zittrain, three quarters of all links cited no longer function. This occurs even at The New York Times, where roughly half of all articles contain at least one rotted link. – https://every.to/p/how-we-built-the-internet
I consider myself a techno-optimist, deeply interested in what the future looks like. One of the core assumptions that I made when I started posting online in 2010ish was that my digital record would be available forever. But I have been saddened (and sometimes pleased) to discover that’s simply not true.
And because I have and continue to spend so much time online (particularly on Twitter / X), I carry an enormous “ambient knowledge” of internet happenings or great old blog posts – and I’ve recently been sad to find some of those links I remember “rotten” on the internet.
Old games, like Club Penguin and Adventure Quest deprecate, and I can no longer access the nostalgia of my past. A social media site like Vine gets shut down, all the videos are lost. An old phone dies, and with it all my middle school memories are gone. YouTube can delete old videos, you can lose your passwords or forget what website you were on. A favorite twitter account gets suspended, and you lose all those jokes. God forbid I forget to pay hosting fees on this wonderful blog, all my writing disappears. It’s a weird kind of grief when you go looking for some past nostalgia & it just doesn’t…exist anymore.
There is a real frailty and ephemerality on the internet that I think we as a society are just starting coming to terms with.
A quote from Joan Didion’s haunting “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” her classic account of adultery and murder in San Bernardino County, published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1966 – has stayed with me since I read it three or four years ago:
‘The past is not believed to have any bearing upon the present or future, out in the Golden land where every day the world is born anew.’
Our push on the internet’s Golden land towards an ever-growing, ever-improving future has left us in a Gatsby-esque state. Always searching for the green light, in a blissful state of consuming daily content, and looking to the future innovations. But how often do we go back?
One of my favorite internet sites is the WayBack machine. It is so wonderful to go back in time. Time seems to bend differently on the internet – wild to think it’s been almost ten years since “the dress” viral phenomena.
When we look back at previous civilizations, the clay tablets they made lasted thousands of years. I wonder what our “clay tablets” will be. Some of the questions I’ve been thinking about in relation to this topic of Internet Ephemerality are – who becomes the historian of the internet? Especially in the age of AI, does the internet become more private? less forum-based? Where does all this data go? How do we safeguard our past? In what science fiction future may we find ourselves?
For the most part, I think that which has perished on the web has done so because the immediate value was no longer seen at the necessary scale (respective to the amount of resources to maintain the data). And in a way, this is the story of all information. This is ironic given the “once it’s there, it stays there” notion regarding data permanence on the web.
What is especially annoying is a lot of this “lost” data exists somewhere, but the path to reach it has been severed. Dead links that refer to an endpoint inaccessible by Wayback may have those resources existing elsewhere (saved to disk, rehosted with no redirect, etc.) Or how about an account lost with no remediation available, or x, y, etc?
I think that of importance can almost certainly be found through digging, the problem is that so much of what is to us is not in the broader sense, like Club Penguin (or Neopets for the OGs).
In my opinion, the best we can do is pour out a glass for the lost data homies, just like the real ones.
As a fellow techno-optimist, I believe all the lost data on the internet is recoverable.
Where does all this data go?
As a techno-optimist, I believe this data will be recoverable through advancing chips. I am not much of a computer wizard, however, this deleted data may be regenerable. I think ROM/RAM could be a good place to start. Also, some internet historians could help in deciding which data to keep.