Digital Mortality

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. S... See more

“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.”

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

Oh! Of course! Impermanence! I always forget. The Buddhist writer Jack Kornfield wrote of his teacher holding up a teacup, saying: “To me this cup is already broken. Because I know its fate, I can enjoy it fully here and now. And when it’s gone, it’s gone.” The cup is already broken. The phone and wallet are already lost. We have everything we need... See more

plato says “death should be viewed as the achievement of life.”

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

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

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 o... See more