Internet Evanescence
Things on the internet tend to die. Once things die, in due time, memory then follows. In this way, the internet resembles life. We try our best, of course, to cling to memory. We have many words for this – historiography, genealogy and archaeology, to name a few, but despite our best efforts, it is always a question of when memory will die, not if.
Death, naturally, feels unfortunate. Often, it feels preventable. Frequently, it is frustrating. These all can be true, but death is also natural. It is to be expected. Postponement is one thing, but avoidance is another beast entirely. All attempts at avoidance as a definite promise are certainly futile, though if such an attempt did succeed, the fabric of our society would fall under siege. Growth is overwhelming, and unmanageable.
The web can aptly be described as a bloated mess. By now, every search is met with hundreds of results that all grab at your attention. It’s entirely impossible to sift through all the results with a reasonably high level of success, though there’s no doubt that hundreds that have devoted PhDs to trying. Still, there’s this wonderful property of the web, and of knowledge. It exists only as long as somebody cares for it. Almost as soon as a maintainer gives up, the website they grew falls away. This, of course, is also frustrating. Not everybody who cares for a particular site possesses the power to preserve it – except, they do.
Another axiom of knowledge is the generalization rule. Applied to the web, I believe this means that the contents of a site can be maintained between contexts, if all inputs remain the same. This belief is the foundation of archival efforts, and we currently possess the power to preserve knowledge produced by others, should sufficient effort be put into doing so1:
- Adobe Flash’s Gaming Legacy — Thousands upon Thousands of Titles — and My Efforts To Save It
- Vesuvius Challenge
What I’m trying to say is, things on the internet do die – it’s not true that they live forever. As soon as the last person stops caring, data is guaranteed to die, but it could potentially die before then (as soon as the maintainer lets it slip away). If you hold a particular piece of knowledge dear, it is your responsibility to act as an auxiliary steward to it – no matter what corporations2 might want you to believe.
I have downloaded a little chunk of the internet in my short time on this earth – more than most will in a lifetime. In doing so, I have taken initiative in the preservation of the things I care about. We’ve all been taught that what’s on the internet stays on the internet. A little bit of this is true, I suppose, in that you don’t know where the data exists, and how long it will continue to live. But more so, I think it means that individuals should feel empowered to conserve what matters to them. Things don’t live forever, that’s a beauty in of itself, and all the more reason to enjoy, preserve and spread the memories while we still can.
👟 Footnotes
DRM and other content protection methodologies are direct attacks on this axiom, however the properties are maintained. If you can reproduce the environment that DRM necessitates for playback, reproduction in another context is possible. ↩︎
And any other entity with a vested interest in consolidating information within the hands of a few gatekeepers ↩︎