What happens when the internet disappears?

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

There is something deeply offensive in knowing not only that hundreds of thousands of my words have vanished, but that some LLM is probably crawling through the tattered fragments to churn out mockeries of the very real sources, research, and energy that once backed those words. They’ll be vomited back on the shores of my browser, squirming and sti... 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?

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

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.

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

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

Historical content can be an incredibly informative resource, telling us how people lived and thought.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

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.