Digital Mortality

“I’m not so full of hubris that I think that it’s a given that everything I have now is going to last forever,” she says. “People on the internet, they think they’re God, like they’re never going to die. And I think that I could die.”

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

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

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 TikTok was briefly shut down last month, the app’s more than 150 million American users had the same sudden realization. The platform’s centrality to human connection was made explicit and intolerable. Billions of social ties were erased by forces unseen and beyond our control. We had built this online world only to find that it did not belong... See more

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

But instead what we’re doing is spending a whole lot of time masturbating, shopping and watching other people do things online. And essentially what’s happened is we’re spending more and more of our energy and creativity investing in this online world, which means that we are actually leaching our real-life existence of our energy and creativity.... See more

In recent years, many travelers have deliberately slowed down during their trips, tossing out the crammed itineraries to fully immerse themselves in one destination. It’s a practice that some travel experts call slow travel.

“Many tourists arrive at the same place, take dozens of photos with their mobile phone and continue running to another point... See more