What happens when the internet disappears?

The notion that everything that ever has been and ever will be on the internet will always be there — potentially to haunt us — feels less true in an era when data is constantly disappearing.

This is, at times, how the internet feels right now. We are being slowly erased, but instead of passing peacefully into the vale with the ebb and flow of soothing waves, we are being actively replaced by garbage.

Historical content can be an incredibly informative resource, telling us how people lived and thought. But we must remember that it’s a small fraction of contemporaneous material that survives, even as we hope, of course, that it’s our own existence that is ultimately memorialized. Sometimes it is through the gaps that we read history or are forced... See more

We can’t hope to capture every single fragment of the internet, from the first lagging days of DARPA to the videos attached to each TikTok sound, to preserve the fire hose of content we are all wallowing in. But we can have a conversation about which things we value and believe should be kept, which things should be allowed to disappear into the wa... See more

The same accessibility and low barriers to entry, that same easy come — I can set up a website in the time it takes me to finish this sentence — can also morph into an easy go.

We are watching the internet slip away as websites and apps rise and fall, swallowed by private equity, shuttered by burnout, or simply frozen in time — taking with it our memories, our cultural phenomena, our memes. In theory, as we like to tell Zoomers who are putting it all out there, “the internet is forever.” Employers and enemies can and will... See more

When you describe yourself as a “writer” but your writing has become hard to find, it creates a crisis not just of profession, but identity. Who am I, if not my content? It is hard not to feel the disappearance of creative work as a different kind of death of the author, one in which readers can’t interpret my work because they can’t find it. It is... See more

The internet has become a series of lacunas, spaces where content used to be.

a recent Pew Research Center study on digital decay found that 38 percent of webpages accessible in 2013 are not accessible today.