We’ve all heard the warning that “The internet is forever.” But in reality, huge swaths of the digital world are disappearing all the time: websites go dark, governments purge public records, social media posts vanish, and streaming platforms remove films and music, Without deliberate efforts to preserve this material, much of our recent history could simply cease to exist. The Internet Archive has spent decades fighting that disappearance, most nottably through its Wayback Machine, which preserves snapshots of a web that is otherwise constantly being rewritten. Current Affairs spoke with Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, and librarian Chris Freeland, co-editor of the Internet Archive’s new Vanishing Culture report, about why the internet is far more fragile than we think and what is lost when corporations and governments can make information disappear.
Nathan J. Robinson
Okay, listen, I want to start with a phrase—a phrase that will get under your skin, a phrase that I’m sure you’ve heard many times, and that we’re going to correct here at the beginning. And the phrase is some variation on “the internet is forever,” that is to say, when you put something online, it’s never going to go away. I’ve heard that all of my life; I have lived through the birth of the internet, the entire history of the internet, and I’ve heard that all the time. So, tell us, is the internet in fact forever? And if not, in what ways is it not?
The only problem back then was discovery. Finding the site that could give you what you were looking for wasn’t always easy, then Google came around and not only was it lightning fast, but it actually found things so much easier than Ask Jeeves, msn, AOL or Yahoo.
Then it slowly morphed into the mess we get now from there. AI seems to be making it much worse, not better.
I searched verbatim for something niche and uniquely named the other day. The smaller sites I use to avoid the big tech couldn’t find it, and Google was 3 pages of ads, AI crap and competitors. The site was on page 4.
Ugh.
That’s a really great perspective. Google is unusable now, I concur. I tried looking up a guide for Nova Roma (sorta like a classic Sierra Caesar game) water management, and my Buddha it was pages of AI guides, ads, and slop from the same three sources. I give up.