What happens when the internet disappears?

Every few days I open my inbox and get an email from someone asking for an old article of mine, but they can’t find it. They are graduate students, activists, teachers developing syllabuses, researchers, fellow journalists, or just people who revisit their bookmarks frequently and wonder why the links suddenly have nowhere to go. They scour the web and find references, but not the article itself, and try to trace the source of an idea. They are readers trying to understand the threads of society and culture, from the peak of feminist blogging in the 2010s to shifting cultural attitudes about disability, but finding nothing.

This isn’t a problem unique to me: A recent Pew Research Center study on digital decline found 38% of web pages that were accessible in 2013 are now inaccessible. This happens because pages are removed, URLs are changed, and entire websites disappear, e.g. Dozens of scientific journals and all the critical research contained therein. This is especially bad for news: Northwestern University researchers estimate we’ll lose One-third of local news sites By 2025, the rise and fall of digital-first real estate will be almost uncountable. The web becomes a series of white spaces, spaces where content once existed. Sometimes it’s me looking for this stuff, spending an hour in the Wayback Machine reverse engineering something because I want to quote it, or reading the whole article and not just a quote from another publication, echo of echo . I have uploaded the clipped PDF to My personal website In addition to linking to them to make sure they’re still accessible (at least until I stop paying hosting fees), it’s painful to think about the amount of work I’ve lost due to downed sites, reorganized links, hacks that were never fixed, server outages, and sometimes This was accompanied by false promises of restoring and maintaining the archive.

When you describe yourself as a “writer” but your work is hard to find, it creates not only a career crisis, but an identity crisis as well. If it’s not my content, who am I? It’s hard not to see the disappearance of a creative work as another death of the author, the reader unable to interpret my work because they can’t find it. It is a phenomenon that fades away, loses shape and relevance.

We live in an era of content, the creator economy, where everyone and their grandparents have become “content creators.” We’ve watched the internet disappear as sites and apps rise and fall, be swallowed up by private equity, shut down by burnout, or simply frozen in time – taking with it our memories, our cultural phenomena, our memes . Theoretically, as we like to tell those Zoomers at full tilt, “the Internet is forever.” Employers and enemies can and will hunt down your worst moments online, and even things that theoretically get deleted Can reappear on mirror sites and archives with screenshots of semi-forgotten forums. However, in reality, things can disappear as if they never existed, sometimes even suddenly. The same accessibility and low barrier to entry, the same hard-won—I can build a website in the time it takes to finish this sentence—can also evolve into an effortless process. While a social media account can be locked or banned in the blink of an eye due to real or perceived terms of service violations, a respected feminist publication can disappear suddenlynews startups can disappearing as fast as it rose Prominent, news organizations can be nuke Decades of Music News or television archives Just flip the switch. restructured links and Search infrastructure is fundamentally broken It’s possible to push an article out of sight of all but the most determined. For example, I want to know how long my time National Magazine Award-Winning Column exist catapult Will continue to visit online and live as usual Based on the whims of its owner, an eccentric billionaire.

Content loss is not a new phenomenon. It is a phenomenon endemic to human society, characterized by ephemerality and difficult to understand from a distance. For every Shakespeare, there are hundreds of other playwrights who lived, wrote and died, whose names we remember neither their names nor their lines. (And, of course, there’s a Marlowe, for girls who know. For every Dickens, the countless penny horror novels on cheap newsprint won’t stand up to decades. For every complaint about poor customer service of the iconic cuneiform tablet, countless more have been denied.

For digital storage, this is a particularly complex issue. As with every carefully archived digital project, there are also cases where hard drives become corrupted, content is erased, and media formats become virtually unreadable and unusable, as I recently did when I was looking for a reel-to-reel machine to recover some audio from reel to reel as found. Every digital media format, from Bernoulli boxes to server racks The earth is slowly boilingis ultimately doomed to become obsolete as it is superseded by the next innovation, Even the Library of Congress is working to preserve digital archives.

Historical content can be an extremely rich source of information about how people lived and thought. But we must remember that what survives is only a small fraction of the contemporary material, although we hope, of course, that it is our own existence that is ultimately commemorated. Sometimes it is through these gaps that we read history, or are forced to think about why some things are more likely to persist than others, better remembered than others, why other histories are actively suppressed, as we are in the United States Enacting legislation aimed at accurately teaching history as seen everywhere.

So why does the current situation feel so grim? The shortest and most obvious answer is that these things feel more real when we experience them and that they affect us directly; our intellectual understanding of history is different when we live it, especially For the “extremely online” among us, who are constantly immersed in the constant mourning of the death of the Internet, “What if [you recognize a floppy disc / landline phone / LAN party]” meme.

The longer answer tells the story of historical trends that are fundamentally reshaping humanity, with the boom in artificial intelligence making a particularly brutal contribution to our current state. While many of us have been enjoying a bit of artificial intelligence as a treat, dabbling in ChatGPT to help draft an angry letter to a utility company, or hanging out with increasingly crazier half-way prompts, we’re unknowingly contributing to of our own despair.

Along the rugged Northern California coastline where I live, a phenomenon occurs when the conditions are right, or more accurately, when they aren’t: a layer of green, frothy scum that clings to the surface of the ocean, so when the waves Once your footprints wash away, they’re replaced by a foul-smelling layer of slime dotted with writhing sea creatures. Sometimes, that’s what the internet feels like right now. We are being slowly erased, but instead of drifting peacefully into the valley with the ebb and flow of calm waves, we are actively being replaced by trash.

The garbage produced by an industry that broadly calls itself “artificial intelligence”—a term so overused that it’s starting to lose all meaning—devours and then regurgitates our content, green foam, stinking, stuck where people once were Life has passed on the sand. I started to disengage every time I received a new notice about the terms of service, in which I learned that my content would be used to train another large language model designed to replace me, as businesses try to flood the world with content Replace creativity and joy. I tried to negotiate protections in the contract and was turned down, and lay awake at night wondering how much of my work had been incorporated into the system that generated billions of dollars in profits for manufacturers through our labor. Every time I log in, I sigh that LinkedIn and all writing jobs are actually advertisements for training on the latest AI hot spots.

The comparison to our green wave goes deeper than that, as artificial intelligence is actually burn the world Promoting climate change in the name of profit Causes toxic algae blooms. Just as the British threw papyrus and mummies into the hungry maws of steam engines, we are destroying history and culture to fuel empire, and empire is profit. turn out Internet poisoningAt best, a landscape filled with misinformation and artificial intelligence garbage funnyin the worst case, fatal. For future generations interested in learning more about the world we live in, it threatens to make it almost impossible to distinguish fact from fiction, art from falsehood. It is deeply offensive to know that hundreds of thousands of my words have disappeared, and that some LL.M. is probably crawling among the tattered fragments, making a mockery of the very real sources, research, and energy that once underpinned them. They would be spat back onto the shores of my browser, squirming and stinking.

There is also a strange and painful loss of autonomy in watching humanity slowly disappear beyond the dark and inherently unstable veil of digital storage of artificial intelligence, as many of us fight for the right to exist in our own bodies And when it comes to struggle, it takes a dark turn. We accept terms of service without reading them, assign rights to our content to the platforms we publish on, and when those platforms suddenly shut down or Remove our content Or locking us out of our accounts, we will mourn this loss as we learn firsthand what it means to give up our digital rights. I control the fate of my data when I choose to delete my tweets, remove my self-hosted blog from the internet, or set up a finsta, but I lose control when a finsta maintains an archive. , forgotten, easily abandoned.

In an age of disappearing data, the idea that everything that has ever existed and will exist on the web will always be there—and potentially haunt us—feels unreal. In fact, the Internet does not exist forever. Sure, sometimes the zombies of a bad performance linger, but it’s equally possible that we disappear, as I recently found out when I realized that one of my Twitter accounts (in 2009- Active during 2023) has been deleted because I have not logged in recently. Countless quips, educational threads, exchanges with other users, photos, and of course misinformation, bad opinions that I’d rather forget, just disappear into thin air. It feels like it’s been erased, maybe irrationally, like the person was never erased.

i sometimes think voyager gold recordspinning endlessly into eternity, is a cry into the void, a curated selection of human experiences that attempt to convey the vastness of Earth’s history and culture to other living beings. The products, selected by a committee headed by Carl Sagan, include photos of a woman in a grocery store, the sound of footsteps, photos from magic flute, Images of astronauts in space, human heartbeat. The process of picking and choosing what to include must have been painful and fraught, constrained not only by storage considerations but also by politics, pressure and cultural hegemony. The result is a highly fragmented, unstable and selective view of what it means to be human, a testament more to our limitations than to our potential, a reminder that archival work is not neutral, and a powerful case for the diversity of how we preserve information. .

We can’t expect to capture every piece of the internet, from DARPA’s earliest days behind the scenes to the video attached to every TikTok sound, to preserve the content we’re all addicted to. What should be allowed to disappear in the waves, and who among us should be remembered, echoing into the future like Sagan’s laugh. How satisfied are we with the total disappearance of professional and artistic pursuits? Who is making these decisions—private equity or journalists, artificial intelligence or archivists, billionaires or workers? The answers to these questions and how we define ourselves today will shape our culture in the future.