By s.e. smith
Every few days, I open my inbox to an email from someone asking after an old article of mine that they can’t find. They’re graduate students, activists, teachers setting up their syllabus, researchers, fellow journalists, or simply people with a frequently revisited bookmark, not understanding why a link suddenly goes nowhere. They’re people who searched the internet and found references, but not the article itself, and are trying to track an idea down to its source. They’re readers trying to understand the throughlines of society and culture, ranging from peak feminist blogging of the 2010s to shifts in cultural attitudes about disability, but coming up empty.
This is not a problem unique to me: a recent Pew Research Center study on digital decay found that 38 percent of webpages accessible in 2013 are not accessible today. This happens because pages are taken down, URLs are changed, and entire websites vanish, as in the case of dozens of scientific journals and all the critical research they contained. This is especially acute for news: researchers at Northwestern University estimate we will lose one-third of local news sites by 2025, and the digital-first properties that have risen and fallen are nearly impossible to count. The internet has become a series of lacunas, spaces where content used to be. Sometimes it is me searching for that content, spending an hour reverse engineering something in the Wayback Machine because I want to cite it, or read the whole article, not just a quote in another publication, an echo of an echo. It’s reached the point where I upload PDFs of my clips to my personal website in addition to linking to them to ensure they’ll remain accessible (until I stop paying my hosting fees, at least), thinking bitterly of the volume of work I’ve lost to shuttered websites, restructured links, hacks that were never repaired, servers disrupted, sometimes accompanied by false promises that an archive would be restored and maintained.
Who am I, if not my content?
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 a sort of fading away, of losing shape and relevance.
We live in a content era, the creator economy, in which everyone and their grandparent has turned into a “content creator.” 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 ferret out your worst moments on the internet, and even things that were, in theory, deleted can be resurfaced on mirrored sites and archives, with screenshots of half-forgotten forums. And yet, in reality, things can disappear as though they never were, sometimes quite suddenly. The same accessibility and low barriers to entry, that same easy come — I can set up a website in the time it takes me to finish this sentence — can also morph into an easy go. A social media account can be locked or banned for a real or perceived terms of service violation in the blink of an eye, a venerable feminist publication can abruptly vanish, a news startup can wink out of existence just as quickly as it rose to prominence, and news organizations can nuke decades of music journalism or TV archives at the flick of a switch. Restructured links and a fundamentally broken search infrastructure can shift an article out of view to all but the most determined. I wonder, for example, how long my National Magazine Award-winning column at Catapult will remain accessible online, living as it does at the whims of its owner, an eccentric billionaire.
The loss of content is not a new phenomenon. It’s endemic to human societies, marked as we are by an ephemerality that can be hard to contextualize from a distance. For every Shakespeare, hundreds of other playwrights lived, wrote, and died, and we remember neither their names nor their words. (There is also, of course, a Marlowe, for the girlies who know.) For every Dickens, uncountable penny dreadfuls on cheap newsprint didn’t withstand the test of decades. For every iconic cuneiform tablet bemoaning poor customer service, countless more have been destroyed over the millennia.
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This is a particularly complex problem for digital storage. For every painstakingly archived digital item, there are also hard drives corrupted, content wiped, media formats that are effectively unreadable and unusable, as I discovered recently when I went on a hunt for a reel-to-reel machine to recover some audio from the 1960s. Every digital media format, from the Bernoulli Box to the racks of servers slowly boiling the planet, is ultimately doomed to obsolescence as it’s supplanted by the next innovation, with even the Library of Congress struggling to preserve digital archives.
Historical content can be an incredibly informative resource, telling us how people lived and thought. But we must remember that it’s a small fraction of contemporaneous material that survives, even as we hope, of course, that it’s our own existence that is ultimately memorialized. Sometimes it is through the gaps that we read history or are forced to consider why some things are more likely to persist than others, are more remembered than others, why other histories are subject to active suppression, as we’re seeing across the United States with legislation targeting the accurate teaching of history.
So why does the present situation feel so severe? The shortest and most obvious answer is that things feel more real when we are living through them and they affect us directly; what we understand intellectually about history hits different when we’re living it, especially for the “Extremely Online” among us who are constantly saturated in a steady supply of mourning over the death of the internet and “you might be a millennial if [you recognize a floppy disc / landline phone / LAN party]” memes.
The longer answer speaks to the arc of historical trends that are fundamentally reshaping humanity, with the boom in artificial intelligence standing out as a particularly brutal contributor to our present state. While many have been enjoying a little AI, as a treat, dabbling in ChatGPT to help draft an angry letter to the utility company, or goofing around with increasingly unhinged Midjourney prompts, we are unwittingly contributing to the engine of our own despair.
There’s a phenomenon that happens where I live along the rugged coastline of Northern California, when conditions are right, or more accurately, wrong: a layer of green, foamy scum clings to the surface of the ocean so that when the waves wash your footprints away, they are replaced by a layer of vile, reeking slime dotted by writhing marine organisms. This is, at times, how the internet feels right now. We are being slowly erased, but instead of passing peacefully into the vale with the ebb and flow of soothing waves, we are being actively replaced by garbage.
How comfortable are we with the disappearance of entire swaths of careers and artistic pursuits?
Garbage created by an industry broadly referring to itself as “artificial intelligence” — a term so overused that it is starting to lose all meaning — devouring and then regurgitating our content, a froth of green, smelly foulness that rests on the sands where people once walked. I am starting to disassociate every time I get a new notification about terms of service in which I learn that my content will be used to train yet another large language model designed to replace me, as corporations attempt to replace creativity and joy with a mountain of trash. I attempt to negotiate for protective clauses in contracts and am rejected, lie awake at night wondering how much of my work has already been folded into systems generating billions in profits for their makers on the backs of our labor, sigh every time I log in to LinkedIn and all the writing jobs are actually advertisements for training the latest AI hotness.
The comparison with our green tides runs deeper than that, as AI is literally burning up the world in the name of profits, driving the climate change that causes toxic algae blooms. Much like the British tossing papyrus and mummies into the hungry maws of steam engines, we are destroying history and culture to fuel the empire, and the empire is profit. The result is internet poisoning, a landscape saturated in misinformation and AI garbage — at best comical, at worst, lethal. For future generations interested in knowing more about the world we live in, it has the potential to make it nearly impossible to untangle fact from fiction, art from fakery. There is something deeply offensive in knowing not only that hundreds of thousands of my words have vanished, but that some LLM is probably crawling through the tattered fragments to churn out mockeries of the very real sources, research, and energy that once backed those words. They’ll be vomited back on the shores of my browser, squirming and stinking.
There is also a strange and bitter loss of autonomy in watching humans slowly disappear beyond a veil of AI murk and inherently unstable digital storage, a dark twist at a moment when so many of us are fighting for our right to exist in our own bodies. We have come to accept, without reading, the terms of service that assign the rights of our content to the platforms we post on, and when those platforms abruptly close or delete our content or lock us out of our accounts, we mourn the loss as we receive a firsthand lesson in what it means to sign our digital rights away. When I choose to delete my tweets, take my self-hosted blog off the internet, or set up a finsta, I’m in control of my data destiny, but the loss of control when archives are maintained by the winners serves to make me feel small, forgotten, easily disposed of.
The notion that everything that ever has been and ever will be on the internet will always be there — potentially to haunt us — feels less true in an era when data is constantly disappearing. The internet is not, in fact, forever; sometimes the zombie of a bad take will linger, sure, but just as probably, we’ll vanish, as I recently discovered when I realized that one of my Twitter accounts, active from 2009–2023, had been wiped because I hadn’t logged in recently. An untold number of bon mots, educational threads, exchanges with fellow users, photographs, and of course, misinformed, shitty opinions I’d rather forget, simply gone, into the ether. It felt, perhaps irrationally, like being erased, like that person had never been.
I think sometimes of the Voyager Golden Records, spinning endlessly into eternity, a cry into the void that features a selection of carefully curated human experiences in an attempt to communicate the vastness of Earth’s history and culture to other beings. The offerings, selected by a committee led by Carl Sagan, include a photograph of a woman in a grocery store, the sound of footsteps, a sampling from The Magic Flute, an image of an astronaut in space, a human heartbeat. The process of picking and choosing what to include must have been agonizing and fraught, limited not just by storage considerations, but politics, pressure, and cultural hegemony. The result is a highly fragmented, erratic, selective view of what it means to be human, more a testimony of our limitations than of our potential, a reminder that archival work is not neutral, and a powerful case for diversifying the way we preserve information.
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 waves, and who among us stands to be remembered, echoing, like Sagan’s laughter, into the future. How comfortable are we with the disappearance of entire swaths of careers and artistic pursuits? And who is making these decisions — private equity or journalists, AI or archivists, billionaires or workers? The answers to these questions, and the way we define ourselves today, will shape our culture of the future.
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