On Internet decay due to prolonged lack of maintenance, government censorship, the importance of preservation, and how the web is at risk of disappearing altogether.
One of the weirdest shifts to watch is the retreat from niche forums to massive platforms like Reddit/etc. (not to mention the disappearance of these places without archiving). It seems we are moving from independence & real communities to monolithic algorithms. I miss the “old Internet” but I don’t think it’s coming back.
i agree we can’t save it, we can only hope to preserve it… but speaking of reddit, as of a week ago they banned internet archive from archiving any of the platform 💔 will be writing about that soon but yeah horrible news
This is so good and bummed me the hell out. Have been fascinated with the entropy of link rot for a long time, but the advent of AI really has made that so much stranger. Something I think about often is how at some point we crossed a threshold where we’ll never get the noise of the LLM out of it, even if it fully went bust. We’ve already trained copies on copies, so even if you “save” or “preserve” the internet, you can only ever preserve a version that’s already folded in on itself.
This is really excellently written — "The shift from proper noun to generic term demonstrates, to me, ambivalence toward the Internet as not just a place but a place we care about. De-capitalization signals not a lack of respect but a loss of it." makes me think about places like the Grand Canyon (capitalized) and other national parks/forests/monuments. The preservation of a complicated and morally compromised "frontier", and its many complicated ecosystems, from one century to the next, certainly suggests some interesting parallels. (but of course, we all also know that the parks service etc are being gutted by the same policies you already mention...)
This is an excellent article and it is something that I have been thinking about for a really long time. A group of local developer friends and I have been working on a platform to collect blogs and other independent websites. The issues that we have run into are the ones you identify in this article: 1) people who submit blogs that are clearly written by ChatGPT and populated with AI images and 2) dead links.
Personally - and clearly this is a bit of an emotional bias - I do believe that the internet is worth saving and I also think it is possible to create a space that is similar to the old internet. The ability to bypass corporate media outlets and exchange information with each other is too valuable to just give up.
It still breaks my heart that I can't find the old (circa 1999–2001) Campus Crusade for Cthulhu website on the Internet Archive. I once spent a long Sunday afternoon poking around every nook and cranny of it. I'd revisit from time to time the same way I'd idly reread a stack of comic books on quiet evenings. And now to all appearances, it's gone without a trace. Poof.
The internet gave a new meaning to the old Marxist chestnut "all that is solid melts into air." The aim of the digital revolution was to make ephemeral every cultural object it touched. If the Campus Crusade for Cthulhu had been a zine, I could have held on to it. I could have kept a collection in a box with my postcards and my old family photographs. Or like my (very) old stack of X-Men comics and Mad Magazine issues—which I threw out years and years ago because I was so certain that digital versions of them would be available forever. Lately I'm not so sure of that.
One of the weirdest shifts to watch is the retreat from niche forums to massive platforms like Reddit/etc. (not to mention the disappearance of these places without archiving). It seems we are moving from independence & real communities to monolithic algorithms. I miss the “old Internet” but I don’t think it’s coming back.
i agree we can’t save it, we can only hope to preserve it… but speaking of reddit, as of a week ago they banned internet archive from archiving any of the platform 💔 will be writing about that soon but yeah horrible news
This is so good and bummed me the hell out. Have been fascinated with the entropy of link rot for a long time, but the advent of AI really has made that so much stranger. Something I think about often is how at some point we crossed a threshold where we’ll never get the noise of the LLM out of it, even if it fully went bust. We’ve already trained copies on copies, so even if you “save” or “preserve” the internet, you can only ever preserve a version that’s already folded in on itself.
This is really excellently written — "The shift from proper noun to generic term demonstrates, to me, ambivalence toward the Internet as not just a place but a place we care about. De-capitalization signals not a lack of respect but a loss of it." makes me think about places like the Grand Canyon (capitalized) and other national parks/forests/monuments. The preservation of a complicated and morally compromised "frontier", and its many complicated ecosystems, from one century to the next, certainly suggests some interesting parallels. (but of course, we all also know that the parks service etc are being gutted by the same policies you already mention...)
Great work! 👏🏽
thank you!!
this was an incredibly thought-provoking read, thank you! i also love alexis tierney’s content, she’s inspired me to do archival work
This is an excellent article and it is something that I have been thinking about for a really long time. A group of local developer friends and I have been working on a platform to collect blogs and other independent websites. The issues that we have run into are the ones you identify in this article: 1) people who submit blogs that are clearly written by ChatGPT and populated with AI images and 2) dead links.
Personally - and clearly this is a bit of an emotional bias - I do believe that the internet is worth saving and I also think it is possible to create a space that is similar to the old internet. The ability to bypass corporate media outlets and exchange information with each other is too valuable to just give up.
It still breaks my heart that I can't find the old (circa 1999–2001) Campus Crusade for Cthulhu website on the Internet Archive. I once spent a long Sunday afternoon poking around every nook and cranny of it. I'd revisit from time to time the same way I'd idly reread a stack of comic books on quiet evenings. And now to all appearances, it's gone without a trace. Poof.
The internet gave a new meaning to the old Marxist chestnut "all that is solid melts into air." The aim of the digital revolution was to make ephemeral every cultural object it touched. If the Campus Crusade for Cthulhu had been a zine, I could have held on to it. I could have kept a collection in a box with my postcards and my old family photographs. Or like my (very) old stack of X-Men comics and Mad Magazine issues—which I threw out years and years ago because I was so certain that digital versions of them would be available forever. Lately I'm not so sure of that.