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414 lines
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Plaintext
[1]Skip to main content
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[2]The Verge logo.[3]The Verge homepage
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• [4]The Verge homepageThe Verge logo./
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[11]The Verge logo.
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• [13]Internet Culture
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How to disappear completely
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The internet is forever. But also, it isn’t. What happens to our culture when
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websites start to vanish at random?
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By [14]s.e. smith
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Dec 18, 2024, 1:00 PM UTC
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Share this story
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•
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•
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•
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[How_to_dis]
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Michelle Rohn / The Verge
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Every few days, I open my inbox to an email from someone asking after an old
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article of mine that they can’t find. They’re graduate students, activists,
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teachers setting up their syllabus, researchers, fellow journalists, or simply
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people with a frequently revisited bookmark, not understanding why a link
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suddenly goes nowhere. They’re people who searched the internet and found
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references, but not the article itself, and are trying to track an idea down to
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its source. They’re readers trying to understand the throughlines of society
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and culture, ranging from peak feminist blogging of the 2010s to shifts in
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cultural attitudes about disability, but coming up empty.
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This is not a problem unique to me: a recent Pew Research Center study on
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digital decay found that [19]38 percent of webpages accessible in 2013 are not
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accessible today. This happens because pages are taken down, URLs are changed,
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and entire websites vanish, as in the case of [20]dozens of scientific journals
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and all the critical research they contained. This is especially acute for
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news: researchers at Northwestern University estimate we will lose [21]
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one-third of local news sites by 2025, and the digital-first properties that
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have risen and fallen are nearly impossible to count. The internet has become a
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series of lacunas, spaces where content used to be. Sometimes it is me
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searching for that content, spending an hour reverse engineering something in
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the Wayback Machine because I want to cite it, or read the whole article, not
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just a quote in another publication, an echo of an echo. It’s reached the point
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where I upload PDFs of my clips to [22]my personal website in addition to
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linking to them to ensure they’ll remain accessible (until I stop paying my
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hosting fees, at least), thinking bitterly of the volume of work I’ve lost to
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shuttered websites, restructured links, hacks that were never repaired, servers
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disrupted, sometimes accompanied by false promises that an archive would be
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restored and maintained.
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Who am I, if not my content?
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When you describe yourself as a “writer” but your writing has become hard to
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find, it creates a crisis not just of profession, but identity. Who am I, if
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not my content? It is hard not to feel the disappearance of creative work as a
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different kind of death of the author, one in which readers can’t interpret my
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work because they can’t find it. It is a sort of fading away, of losing shape
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and relevance.
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We live in a content era, the creator economy, in which everyone and their
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grandparent has turned into a “content creator.” We are watching the internet
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slip away as websites and apps rise and fall, swallowed by private equity,
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shuttered by burnout, or simply frozen in time — taking with it our memories,
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our cultural phenomena, our memes. In theory, as we like to tell Zoomers who
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are putting it all out there, “the internet is forever.” Employers and enemies
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can and will ferret out your worst moments on the internet, and even things
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that were, in theory, deleted can be resurfaced on mirrored sites and archives,
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with screenshots of half-forgotten forums. And yet, in reality, things can
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disappear as though they never were, sometimes quite suddenly. The same
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accessibility and low barriers to entry, that same easy come — I can set up a
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website in the time it takes me to finish this sentence — can also morph into
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an easy go. A social media account can be locked or banned for a real or
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perceived terms of service violation in the blink of an eye, a venerable
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feminist publication can [23]abruptly vanish, a news startup can [24]wink out
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of existence just as quickly as it rose to prominence, and news organizations
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can nuke [25]decades of music journalism or [26]TV archives at the flick of a
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switch. Restructured links and a [27]fundamentally broken search infrastructure
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can shift an article out of view to all but the most determined. I wonder, for
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example, how long my [28]National Magazine Award-winning column at Catapult
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will remain accessible online, living as it does [29]at the whims of its owner,
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an eccentric billionaire.
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The loss of content is not a new phenomenon. It’s endemic to human societies,
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marked as we are by an ephemerality that can be hard to contextualize from a
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distance. For every Shakespeare, hundreds of other playwrights lived, wrote,
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and died, and we remember neither their names nor their words. (There is also,
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of course, a Marlowe, for the girlies who know.) For every Dickens, uncountable
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penny dreadfuls on cheap newsprint didn’t withstand the test of decades. For
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every iconic cuneiform tablet bemoaning poor customer service, countless more
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have been destroyed over the millennia.
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Two hands holding two postcards, the front of which shows a goblin at an
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old-fashioned computer and reads: Content Goblins.Two hands holding two
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postcards, the front of which shows a goblin at an old-fashioned computer and
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reads: Content Goblins.
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Two hands holding two postcards, the front of which shows a goblin at an
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old-fashioned computer and reads: Content Goblins.Two hands holding two
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postcards, the front of which shows a goblin at an old-fashioned computer and
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reads: Content Goblins.
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This story is featured in [30]Content Goblins, a limited-run print magazine
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about “content” and the people who “make” it. Get your copy of this gorgeous /
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deranged publication by [31]signing up for an annual subscription to The Verge,
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while supplies last.
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This is a particularly complex problem for digital storage. For every
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painstakingly archived digital item, there are also hard drives corrupted,
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content wiped, media formats that are effectively unreadable and unusable, as I
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discovered recently when I went on a hunt for a reel-to-reel machine to recover
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some audio from the 1960s. Every digital media format, from the Bernoulli Box
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to the racks of servers [32]slowly boiling the planet, is ultimately doomed to
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obsolescence as it’s supplanted by the next innovation, with [33]even the
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Library of Congress struggling to preserve digital archives.
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Historical content can be an incredibly informative resource, telling us how
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people lived and thought. But we must remember that it’s a small fraction of
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contemporaneous material that survives, even as we hope, of course, that it’s
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our own existence that is ultimately memorialized. Sometimes it is through the
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gaps that we read history or are forced to consider why some things are more
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likely to persist than others, are more remembered than others, why other
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histories are subject to active suppression, as we’re seeing across the United
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States with legislation targeting the accurate teaching of history.
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So why does the present situation feel so severe? The shortest and most obvious
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answer is that things feel more real when we are living through them and they
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affect us directly; what we understand intellectually about history hits
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different when we’re living it, especially for the “Extremely Online” among us
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who are constantly saturated in a steady supply of mourning over the death of
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the internet and “you might be a millennial if [you recognize a floppy disc /
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landline phone / LAN party]” memes.
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The longer answer speaks to the arc of historical trends that are fundamentally
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reshaping humanity, with the boom in artificial intelligence standing out as a
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particularly brutal contributor to our present state. While many have been
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enjoying a little AI, as a treat, dabbling in ChatGPT to help draft an angry
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letter to the utility company, or goofing around with increasingly unhinged
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Midjourney prompts, we are unwittingly contributing to the engine of our own
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despair.
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There’s a phenomenon that happens where I live along the rugged coastline of
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Northern California, when conditions are right, or more accurately, wrong: a
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layer of green, foamy scum clings to the surface of the ocean so that when the
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waves wash your footprints away, they are replaced by a layer of vile, reeking
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slime dotted by writhing marine organisms. This is, at times, how the internet
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feels right now. We are being slowly erased, but instead of passing peacefully
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into the vale with the ebb and flow of soothing waves, we are being actively
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replaced by garbage.
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How comfortable are we with the disappearance of entire swaths of careers and
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artistic pursuits?
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Garbage created by an industry broadly referring to itself as “artificial
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intelligence” — a term so overused that it is starting to lose all meaning —
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devouring and then regurgitating our content, a froth of green, smelly foulness
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that rests on the sands where people once walked. I am starting to disassociate
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every time I get a new notification about terms of service in which I learn
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that my content will be used to train yet another large language model designed
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to replace me, as corporations attempt to replace creativity and joy with a
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mountain of trash. I attempt to negotiate for protective clauses in contracts
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and am rejected, lie awake at night wondering how much of my work has already
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been folded into systems generating billions in profits for their makers on the
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backs of our labor, sigh every time I log in to LinkedIn and all the writing
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jobs are actually advertisements for training the latest AI hotness.
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The comparison with our green tides runs deeper than that, as AI is literally
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[34]burning up the world in the name of profits, driving the climate change
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that [35]causes toxic algae blooms. Much like the British tossing papyrus and
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mummies into the hungry maws of steam engines, we are destroying history and
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culture to fuel the empire, and the empire is profit. The result is [36]
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internet poisoning, a landscape saturated in misinformation and AI garbage — at
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best [37]comical, at worst, [38]lethal. For future generations interested in
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knowing more about the world we live in, it has the potential to make it nearly
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impossible to untangle fact from fiction, art from fakery. There is something
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deeply offensive in knowing not only that hundreds of thousands of my words
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have vanished, but that some LLM is probably crawling through the tattered
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fragments to churn out mockeries of the very real sources, research, and energy
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that once backed those words. They’ll be vomited back on the shores of my
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browser, squirming and stinking.
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There is also a strange and bitter loss of autonomy in watching humans slowly
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disappear beyond a veil of AI murk and inherently unstable digital storage, a
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dark twist at a moment when so many of us are fighting for our right to exist
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in our own bodies. We have come to accept, without reading, the terms of
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service that assign the rights of our content to the platforms we post on, and
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when those platforms abruptly close or [39]delete our content or lock us out of
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our accounts, we mourn the loss as we receive a firsthand lesson in what it
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means to sign our digital rights away. When I choose to delete my tweets, take
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my self-hosted blog off the internet, or set up a finsta, I’m in control of my
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data destiny, but the loss of control when archives are maintained by the
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winners serves to make me feel small, forgotten, easily disposed of.
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The notion that everything that ever has been and ever will be on the internet
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will always be there — potentially to haunt us — feels less true in an era when
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data is constantly disappearing. The internet is not, in fact, forever;
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sometimes the zombie of a bad take will linger, sure, but just as probably,
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we’ll vanish, as I recently discovered when I realized that one of my Twitter
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accounts, active from 2009–2023, had been wiped because I hadn’t logged in
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recently. An untold number of bon mots, educational threads, exchanges with
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fellow users, photographs, and of course, misinformed, shitty opinions I’d
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rather forget, simply gone, into the ether. It felt, perhaps irrationally, like
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being erased, like that person had never been.
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I think sometimes of the [40]Voyager Golden Records, spinning endlessly into
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eternity, a cry into the void that features a selection of carefully curated
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human experiences in an attempt to communicate the vastness of Earth’s history
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and culture to other beings. The offerings, selected by a committee led by Carl
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Sagan, include a photograph of a woman in a grocery store, the sound of
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footsteps, a sampling from The Magic Flute, an image of an astronaut in space,
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a human heartbeat. The process of picking and choosing what to include must
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have been agonizing and fraught, limited not just by storage considerations,
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but politics, pressure, and cultural hegemony. The result is a highly
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fragmented, erratic, selective view of what it means to be human, more a
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testimony of our limitations than of our potential, a reminder that archival
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work is not neutral, and a powerful case for diversifying the way we preserve
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information.
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We can’t hope to capture every single fragment of the internet, from the first
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lagging days of DARPA to the videos attached to each TikTok sound, to preserve
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the fire hose of content we are all wallowing in. But we can have a
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conversation about which things we value and believe should be kept, which
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things should be allowed to disappear into the waves, and who among us stands
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to be remembered, echoing, like Sagan’s laughter, into the future. How
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comfortable are we with the disappearance of entire swaths of careers and
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artistic pursuits? And who is making these decisions — private equity or
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journalists, AI or archivists, billionaires or workers? The answers to these
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questions, and the way we define ourselves today, will shape our culture of the
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future.
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Most Popular
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Most Popular
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1. [42]
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One dead, seven injured as Cybertruck explodes outside Trump’s hotel in Las
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Vegas
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2. [43]
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Popeye and Tintin are now in the public domain
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3. [44]
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The Steam Deck has finally been surpassed — by a fork of Valve’s own
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experience
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━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
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4. [45]
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Is Sleep’s Dopesmoker still the heaviest album of all time?
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━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
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5. [46]
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Nosferatu is the stuff of exquisitely erotic nightmares
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━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
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References:
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[1] https://www.theverge.com/24321569/internet-decay-link-rot-web-archive-deleted-culture#content
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[2] https://www.theverge.com/
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[3] https://www.theverge.com/
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[4] https://www.theverge.com/
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[5] https://www.theverge.com/tech
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[6] https://www.theverge.com/reviews
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[7] https://www.theverge.com/science
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[8] https://www.theverge.com/entertainment
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[9] https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence
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[11] https://www.theverge.com/
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||
[13] https://www.theverge.com/internet-culture
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[14] https://www.theverge.com/authors/s-e-smith
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[19] https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/
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[20] https://www.science.org/content/article/dozens-scientific-journals-have-vanished-internet-and-no-one-preserved-them
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[21] https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/06/newspapers-close-decline-in-local-journalism/
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[22] https://www.realsesmith.com/clips
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[23] https://www.opb.org/article/2022/04/17/portland-based-bitch-media-closing-doors-june-2022/
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[24] https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/the-messenger-shutting-down-effective-immediately-1235893470/
|
||
[25] https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/mtv-news-website-archives-pulled-offline-1236047163/
|
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[26] https://latenighter.com/news/paramount-axes-comedy-central-website-show-clips-library/
|
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[27] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
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[28] https://magazine.catapult.co/column/stories/the-beauty-of-spaces-created-for-and-by-disabled-people
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[29] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/business/elizabeth-koch-perception-box.html
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[30] https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/3/24307540/verge-print-magazine-seo-content-goblins
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[31] https://www.theverge.com/subscribe
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[32] https://www.hcn.org/articles/do-data-centers-mean-doomsville-for-renewable-energy/
|
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[33] https://www.loc.gov/preservation/scientists/projects/cd_longevity.html
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[34] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00843-2
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[35] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.21884
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[36] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/20/1065667/how-ai-generated-text-is-poisoning-the-internet/
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[37] https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/24/24164176/theyre-eating-the-damn-glue-pizza
|
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[38] https://gizmodo.com/ai-mushroom-id-dangerous-consumer-advocates-warn-1851355484
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[39] https://slate.com/technology/2022/10/instagram-account-deleted-no-warning-digital-rights.html
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[40] https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-golden-record-overview/
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[42] https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/1/24333612/cybertruck-fire-explosion-trump-hotel-las-vegas
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[43] https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/1/24330191/popeye-tintin-head-2025-public-domain
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[44] https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/30/24329005/bazzite-asus-rog-ally-x-steam-os-editorial
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[45] https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/1/24333190/heavier-than-dopesmoker
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[46] https://www.theverge.com/24322968/nosferatu-review-robert-eggers
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[49] https://www.voxmedia.com/legal/terms-of-use
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[50] https://www.voxmedia.com/legal/privacy-notice
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[52] https://policies.google.com/terms
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[53] http://theverge.com/
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[54] http://theverge.com/
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[55] https://www.theverge.com/culture
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[56] https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/13/24319728/unitedhealthcare-luigi-mangione-brian-thompson-reaction
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[57] https://www.theverge.com/24318644/podcast-election-vc-marketing-business-decoder-interview
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[58] https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/6/24312382/muppet-history-fandom-sexual-harassment-dms
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[59] https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/18/24299530/netflix-jake-paul-mike-tyson-fight-bluesky
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[60] http://theverge.com/
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[61] http://theverge.com/
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[62] https://www.theverge.com/
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[64] https://www.voxmedia.com/legal/terms-of-use
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[67] https://www.voxmedia.com/pages/licensing
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[68] https://www.voxmedia.com/legal/accessibility
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[69] https://status.voxmedia.com/
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[70] https://www.theverge.com/pages/how-we-rate
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[71] https://www.theverge.com/contact-the-verge
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[72] https://www.theverge.com/c/tech/22579076/how-to-tip-the-verge-email-signal-and-more
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[73] https://www.theverge.com/community-guidelines
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[74] https://www.theverge.com/about-the-verge
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[75] https://www.theverge.com/ethics-statement
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[76] https://www.voxmedia.com/vox-advertising
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[77] https://jobs.voxmedia.com/
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[78] https://www.voxmedia.com/
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