What happens when the Internet disappears?
Every few days, I open my inbox to receive an email from someone asking me about an old article of mine that they couldn’t find. They are graduate students, activists, teachers preparing their curricula, researchers, fellow journalists, or simply people with a bookmark that is frequently revisited, and who don’t understand why the link suddenly goes nowhere. They are the people who have searched the Internet and found references, but not the article itself, and are trying to trace the idea back to its source. They are readers who try to understand the broad contours of society and culture, from the heyday of feminist blogging in the 2000s to shifts in cultural attitudes about disability, but come up empty.
This isn’t a problem unique to me: a recent Pew Research Center study on digital decay found this 38 percent of web pages accessed in 2013 are inaccessible today. This happens because pages are removed, URLs change, and entire websites disappear, as in the case of… Dozens of scientific journals And all the critical research it contains. This is especially acute for the news: Researchers at Northwestern University estimate that we will lose A third of local news sites By 2025, it will be almost impossible to count which digital-first properties have risen and fallen. The Internet has become a series of holes, spaces where content used to exist. Sometimes I’m looking for this content, and I spend an hour reverse-engineering something in the Wayback Machine because I want to cite it, or read the entire article, not just a quote in another post, or echo it. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m uploading PDFs of my clips My personal website In addition to linking to them to make sure they’re accessible (until I stop paying hosting fees, at least), and thinking bitterly about the amount of work I’ve lost to closed websites, refactored links, and hacks that are never fixed, servers crash, sometimes accompanied by promises False archive recovery and maintenance.
Who am I if not my content?
When you describe yourself as a “writer” but your writing becomes difficult to find, it creates a crisis not only of profession, but of identity. Who am I if not my content? It’s hard not to feel the disappearance of creative work as a different kind of death of the author, where readers can’t interpret my work because they can’t find it. It kind of fades away, loses form and importance.
We live in the age of content, and the creator economy, where everyone and their grandparents have become a “content creator.” We watch the Internet fade away as websites and apps rise and fall, get swallowed up by private equity, shut down out of exhaustion, or simply frozen in time — taking with them our memories, our cultural phenomena, and our memes. In theory, as we like to say to Zoom users who post everything, “the Internet has been around forever.” Employers and enemies can discover your worst online moments, and even things that were deleted could, in theory, reappear on identical sites and archives, with screenshots of half-forgotten forums. However, in reality, things can disappear as if they never existed, sometimes suddenly. The same accessibility and low barriers to entry, the same ease — I can build a website in the time it takes me to finish this sentence — can also turn into ease. A social media account can be shut down or banned for a real or perceived violation of its terms of service in the blink of an eye, a respected feminist publication can Suddenly disappearcan start the news It blinked out of existence just as quickly as it rose To the fore, news organizations can use nuclear weapons Decades of music journalism or TV archives With the click of a switch button. Restructured links and Fundamentally broken research infrastructure It can shift an article out of the sight of all but the most determined people. I wonder, for example, for how long National magazine award-winning column in Catapult It will still be available online, and it will remain as it is At the whims of its owner, an eccentric billionaire.
Content loss is not a new phenomenon. It is an endemic disease in human societies, characterized like ours by an ephemeral period that is difficult to contextualize from a distance. For every Shakespeare, hundreds of other playwrights lived, wrote and died, whose names or words we do not remember. (There’s also, of course, Marlowe, for girls in the know.) For every Dickens, countless ghastly pennies on cheap newsprint haven’t stood the test of decades. For every famous cuneiform tablet that bemoans poor customer service, countless more have been destroyed over the millennia.
This is a particularly complex problem for digital storage. For every painstakingly archived digital item, there are also damaged hard drives, erased content, and unreadable and unusable media formats, as I recently discovered when I went on a quest for a reel-to-reel machine to reclaim some audio from the 1960s. All digital media formats, from Bernoulli Box to server racks The planet is slowly boilingwas eventually doomed to obsolescence as it was replaced by the next innovation, with Even the Library of Congress is struggling to preserve digital archives.
Historical content can be an incredibly rich source of information, telling us how people lived and thought. But we must remember that only a small fraction of contemporary material survives, even when we hope, of course, that it will be our presence that is ultimately commemorated. Sometimes we read history through the gaps or are forced to consider why some things are more likely to endure than others, or more remembered than others, or why other histories have been actively suppressed, as we see across the United States. With legislation targeting the accurate teaching of history.
So why does the current situation seem so dangerous? The shortest and most obvious answer is that things seem more real when we experience them and affect us directly; What we understand intellectually about history is different when we live it, especially for the “hyper-connected” among us who are always saturated with a steady supply of mourning the death of the Internet and “you might be a millennial if” [you recognize a floppy disc / landline phone / LAN party]“Memes.
The longer answer speaks to an arc of historical trends that are fundamentally reshaping humanity, with the boom in artificial intelligence emerging as a particularly brutal contributor to our current state. While many enjoy a little AI, as a bonus, dabbling in ChatGPT to help draft an angry letter to the utility company, or fiddling with Midjourney’s increasingly turbulent claims, we are unwittingly contributing to the engine of our own desperation.
There’s a phenomenon that happens when I live along the rugged coast of Northern California, when conditions are right, or more accurately, wrong: a layer of frothy green scum sticks to the ocean’s surface so that when the waves wash away your footprints, they’re replaced by a layer of vile, foul-smelling sludge that permeates the surface. Writhing sea creatures. This is, sometimes, how the Internet feels right now. We are slowly being erased, but instead of passing safely into the valley with the ebb and flow of calm waves, we are being replaced by trash.
How comfortable are we with the disappearance of entire groups of artistic professions and endeavors?
Garbage created by an industry that broadly refers to itself as “artificial intelligence” — a term that has been so overused that it has begun to lose all meaning — devours our content and then regenerates it, a foul-smelling green froth that settles on the sand where people once walked. . I start to disconnect every time I get a new Terms of Service notification and learn that my content will be used to train another big language model designed to replace me, as companies try to replace creativity and fun with a mountain of junk. I try to negotiate protective terms in contracts but I get rejected, I stay up at night wondering how much of my work is already being integrated into systems that generate billions in profits for their makers at the expense of our work, and I sigh every time I log on to LinkedIn and all the writing jobs are actually Advertisements for training the latest artificial intelligence technologies.
The comparison with our green tide goes deeper than that, as with artificial intelligence Burn the world In the name of profits, leading to climate change Causes toxic algae blooms. Just as the British threw papyrus and mummies into the nozzles of hungry steam engines, we destroy history and culture to feed empire, and empire is profit. The result is Internet poisoninga spectacle saturated with misinformation and artificial intelligence garbage — comical at best, and at worst, Fatal. For future generations interested in learning more about the world we live in, this would make it nearly impossible to separate fact from fiction, art from fakery. There is something deeply humiliating in knowing not only that hundreds of thousands of my words are gone, but that some Master of the English Language is likely crawling through the tattered fragments to produce a mockery of the real sources, research, and energy that once supported those words. They will be vomited back onto the shores of my browser, writhing and producing a foul odor.
There’s also a strange, bitter loss of autonomy in watching humans slowly disappear behind the veil of artificial intelligence and inherently unstable digital storage, a dark development at a moment when many of us are fighting for our right to exist in our bodies. We have come to accept, without reading, the terms of service that define the rights to our content for the platforms on which we publish it, and when those platforms suddenly shut down or… Delete our content Or locked out of our accounts, we mourn the loss as we receive a first-hand lesson on what it means to sign over our digital rights. When I choose to delete my tweets, take my self-hosted blog off the internet, or set up a finsta, I control the fate of my data, but losing control when the winners keep the archives puts me in control of the fate of my data. You feel small, forgotten, and easily disposable.
The idea that everything that has ever been and ever will be on the Internet will always be there — and potentially haunt us — seems less true in an age where data is constantly disappearing. In fact, the Internet is not forever; Sometimes the bad behavior trance will linger, sure, but more likely we’ll disappear, as I discovered recently when I realized that one of my Twitter accounts, active from 2009 to 2023, had been deleted because I didn’t do it. Recently logged in. Countless kind words, educational threads, exchanges with fellow users, photographs and, of course, false and misleading opinions that I would rather forget and simply go into the ether. It seemed, perhaps irrationally, as if it had been erased, as if this person had never existed.
Sometimes I think of Voyager Golden Recordsrevolving endlessly into eternity, is a cry into the void containing a selection of carefully curated human experiences in an attempt to communicate the breadth of Earth’s history and culture to other beings. The displays, selected by a committee led by Carl Sagan, include an image of a woman in a grocery store, the sound of footsteps, and a sample of… magic flute, Image of an astronaut in space, human heartbeat. The process of picking and choosing what to include must have been painful and fraught, limited not only by storage considerations but also by politics, pressure and cultural hegemony. The result is a fragmented, disorganized, and selective view of what it means to be human, a testament more to our limits than to our potential, a reminder that archival work is not neutral, and a strong case for diversifying the way we preserve information. .
We can’t hope to capture every bit of the internet, from the late, early days of DARPA to the videos attached to every TikTok audio, to preserve the content we’re all drowning in. But we can have a conversation about what things we value and believe in should be kept, what things should be allowed to disappear into the waves, and which of us will be remembered, resonating, like Sagan’s laugh, into the future. How comfortable are we with the disappearance of entire groups of artistic professions and endeavors? Who makes these decisions: private equity or journalists, artificial intelligence or archivists, billionaires or workers? The answers to these questions, and the way we define ourselves today, will shape our culture for the future.