Digital Dark Ages: Internet History, Old Websites Are Disappearing

[Fäthër Cörpsë]

the article is worth a few minutes of your time to read. It’s about the systematic deletion of our digital history, and potential impacts from it.

‘Those who control the present control the past; and those who control the past control the future.’

 

[j.f.🔎]

the article is worth a few minutes of your time to read. It’s about the systematic deletion of our digital history, and potential impacts from it.

‘Those who control the present control the past; and those who control the past control the future.’

Yes in a not too distant future a not too distant future version of Kanye will tell the not too distant future world on a not too distant future Alex Jones podcast that "Puffy maybe wasn't a bad guy" and lose his not too distant future Adidas deal.

 

[Fäthër Cörpsë]

Yes in a not too distant future a not too distant future version of Kanye will tell the not too distant future world on a not too distant future Alex Jones podcast that "Puffy maybe wasn't a bad guy" and lose his not too distant future Adidas deal.

Sounds like the start of a twilight zone episode. “Imagine yourself in a not too distant future … “

 

[hedgerow]

the article is worth a few minutes of your time to read. It’s about the systematic deletion of our digital history, and potential impacts from it.

i don't worry at all about stuff like that...it's not going to affect me one bit

 

[Htos1av]

This is like quasi-news I guess, semi-news but it was really interesting as a history lover so I thought I’d post it.

Full article from Business Insider:

“The long-promised digital apocalypse has finally arrived, and it was heralded by a blog post.

Published on July 18, the post's headline sounded pretty arcane. "Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available," it declared. I know, I know — not exactly an attack of alien zombies from the death dimension. But the news nevertheless freaked me out. It means another swath of the web is about to disappear.

Here's the gist: Google used to have an online service that generated pithy, user-friendly versions of long, commercially unwieldy uniform resource locators — the key addresses that identify everything on the web. Shorter URLs are easier to track and better for online commerce. Google stopped shortening addresses back in 2019, but the concise URLs it had already created kept right on doing their job. Click on one and it would take you to the right webpage, the way it's supposed to.

No more. In the blog post, Google announced that as of next year, all of the existing shortened URLs are getting turned off. Poof. And on the web, if your URL doesn't work, you might as well not exist. You are unreachable. Without laborious renaming, everything behind those links — billions of them, a decade of digital content — will become inaccessible. Gone. Ask not for whom the 404 message tolls.

Now, rendering a bunch of web content invisible isn't the end of days. Not by itself. The problem is, this kind of thing keeps happening. And it's getting worse. Social networks go bankrupt. Digital journalism sitesclose up shop. Companies pull their online products. Links rot. Files get not found. The cloud, as wags have noted, is really just "someone else's computers." And when clouds get turned off, not even the silver lining is left to tell the tale.

Maybe none of this matters much right now. But it will. The internet has become the default archive of our history and culture. And the whole thing is burning down before our eyes, like the Library of Alexandria — only worse. For the first time since people started carving letters into rocks, we're making a time with no history. We're about to enter the Digital Dark Ages.



Attempts to quantify the scope of the problem are heartbreaking. Half of links in US Supreme Court decisions no longer lead to the information being cited. A report in 2021 found that a full quarter of the more than 2.2 million hyperlinks on The New York Times website were broken. Even worse, the Pew Research Center estimates that a quarter of everything put on the web from 2013 to 2023 is inaccessible — meaning almost 40% of the web as it existed in 2013 is simply not there today, a decade later.

The degradation of those links wouldn't panic me so much if they hadn't replaced what came before them — if museum storerooms and dusty library stacks still served as the warehouses of our collective memory. It's not that I miss the days of wrangling with old newspapers preserved on microfiche, or trying to sweet-talk a librarian into an international interlibrary loan. I'm glad lots of old movies are streaming and many out-of-print books are only a few clicks away. But archives and databases are more than places to keep old stuff; what we save defines who we are. Today, so much of everything is only digital that when it disappears, it leaves a hole in our shared culture.

Gawker is gone. So is the archive of The Awl, the beloved culture-criticism site. You can go to a library and read the entire output of long-dead newspapers like the Los Angeles Herald Examiner or New York Newsday, but God help you if you want to read old Vice articles. Shenanigans over the ownership of what used to be Paramount have resulted in the deletion of decades' worth of shows on MTV and Comedy Central.

The Cartoon Network archive is gone. So are Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Answers, big chunks of the Imgur photo service, the spicy parts of Tumblr that got zapped in a porn purge, everything that ever happened on Friendster and the other pre-Facebook social networks, Club Penguin, Neopets, Geocities, AOL, and Prodigy. Vast swaths of video games made for obsolete systems are unplayable memories.

Hard drives have a finite lifespan, and the ones the music industry used for storage in the 1990s ahead of the transition to digital are crumbling. The Department of Veterans Affairs is legally required to preserve all medical records for 75 years after the death of a vet — but it's having problems, in part because of a balky digital records system. And that's not to mention things like personal photographs, most of which now exist only on your phone, and nowhere else. Every email you sent or received in your last job, or anything a deceased relative had on their now-unusable computer? These are the things that make us us. Yet I dare you to find them.



There are always brave souls out there who try to rescue scrolls from a burning library. But it's hard to rescue something that exists only in the ether. "If a library burns down, it's a tragedy, but most of the books survive elsewhere," says Mark Graham, a leading internet archivist. "But the digital world is inherently fragile and potentially ephemeral."

Graham is director of the Wayback Machine, a decades-old project that seeks to collect and save digital copies of web pages, for posterity. Gawker? Yeah, they got most of it. And that Pew study I mentioned, which showed that more than a third of the recent internet had vanished? "When we redid their study using their data, we found that about two-thirds of that material was safely stored on the Wayback Machine," Graham says. "So really only a ninth is gone."

“As we store our lives on our devices, we're actively choosing to punch huge gaps in our historical record. It's self-inflicted cultural amnesia.”

The Wayback Machine automatically archives more than a billion URLs every day. It also performs constant maintenance on the hundreds of millions of links across all 320 language editions of Wikipedia, which are atrophying at a rate of 10,000 URLs a day. Most recently, Graham worked on preserving 5,000 videos from a YouTube channel run by Rohingya activists, whose people were subjected to genocide in 2017. "They asked us to archive it because YouTube regularly deletes videos from their platform," Graham says. "They don't even leave metadata up, so you don't know what was deleted." He says he got all of the videos except one, which was age-restricted.

Usually, the Wayback Machine's biggest obstacle is paywalls. Most of the articles in the world's scientific journals, for example, are widely available to anyone with a university affiliation. But the articles are prohibitively expensive for the rest of us — even if our tax dollars paid for the research they describe. An archive isn't really an archive if no one can afford the entry fee.

But now there's a new threat to archiving our lives: artificial intelligence. When websites don't want to let AI slurp up their content, they block a certain kind of digital crawler-bot — the same species of critter the Wayback Machine uses. "That's happened almost overnight," Graham says. AI, with its insatiable hunger for training data, can't access the sites. But neither can the preservationists. In the wake of artificial intelligence, more intelligence is going to vanish.



Let's be clear: This is about more than just losing a few news articles or clips from your favorite Adult Swim cartoon. What an archive is able to save, down to what formats fit in its file cabinets or data banks, literally determines what gets remembered. If you preserve, say, bank records from the 18th century but not sewing patterns, your annals are going to leave out a lot of people. Similarly, if your digital archive retains only the records of profitable businesses — because the ones that go bust wind up nuking their servers — you lose the memory of everything those deceased companies labored for. And what gets remembered about the past determines what we're able to do in the present. "Society is memory," says Marlene Manoff, who served as a senior collection strategist at MIT Libraries. "When you lose that memory, what does that mean?"

Unreadable hard drives and vanishing links aren't the only threats to the historical record. Consider the selfie. Fifteen years ago, a researcher from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography named Loren McClenachan wanted to know whether commercial overfishing and environmental changes were making fish smaller. So she looked at five decades' worth of pictures of winning sportfishing catchesoff Key West, Florida. The fishing boat company that ran the competitions, it turned out, had kept all the physical photographs, most of which had the date handwritten on the back.

Armed with those artifacts, McClenachan was able to show that over the prior half-century, the sizes of prize-winning catches had declined by more than 50%. None of that data would have been available if all the fishers had kept the records of their catches on their phones. Instead we'd be subject to what's known as "shifting baseline syndrome" — the common assumption that whatever's normal today was the norm in the past, too.

As the internet vanishes and we store our lives on our devices, we're actively choosing to punch huge gaps in our historical record. It's self-inflicted cultural amnesia, made worse by the fact that most of the web is in the hands of large corporations that place little value on preservation. "Over the long term, you can't preserve a digital object in its original form," says Manoff, the former MIT librarian. "But in the case of corporate ownership, the likelihood of responsible long-term stewardship of digital content in any form becomes increasingly unlikely."

The Dark Ages, as historians used to call the early centuries of medieval Europe, lasted for 500 years. Our digital version may never end. A postliterate society leaves exactly as much of a mark on the world as a preliterate one. Which is to say, not much of a mark at all.”



No paywall version of article: https://www.smry.ai/proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.businessinsider.com%2Fdigital-dark-ages-internet-history-old-websites-disappearing-link-rot-2024-10



Original: https://www.businessinsider.com/digital-dark-ages-internet-history-old-websites-disappearing-link-rot-2024-10

ALL of that was "sold" overseas LONG ago, just how it is after US enterprise IT was taken from the white frat boys after 9/11. our version "written in stone" is the ceramic based Mdisc.

 

[D.O.A.]

Heard Gaza supporters took over or are trying to take over internet archives too. damn shame 🤦🏽‍♂️

The only thing that website is good for us archiving news articles you can look back on 4-8 years ago and see how much bullshit the media talks and how they bury their lies by deleting articles that don't work anymore, like the russia shit with trump, hunters laptop not existing etc

 

[Lovinight]

You’re welcome but you seem very conspiratorial though

Yeah well there is definitely a conspiracy at play and it is no theory.

 

[Christopher Hitchens]

You got gaslighted ?
View attachment 831219

Btw just because your reaction score is whatever it is doesn’t mean you’re not a bully because bullies can be popular because we are an ape social mammal species and it shows. My problem isn’t you don’t like my post, I can survive if some people don’t like my post. My problem is that you are a slimeball weasel who i just know is a timid punk irl who hides behind his keyboard because everyone like you is like that irl.

Yeah well there is definitely a conspiracy at play and it is no theory.

what conspiracy? like Illuminati shit? be careful not to cling to or believe in a theory that explains to much because it’s always (amost) wrong

ALL of that was "sold" overseas LONG ago, just how it is after US enterprise IT was taken from the white frat boys after 9/11. our version "written in stone" is the ceramic based Mdisc.

What do you mean sold, like to who and for what?

The only thing that website is good for us archiving news articles you can look back on 4-8 years ago and see how much bullshit the media talks and how they bury their lies by deleting articles that don't work anymore, like the russia shit with trump, hunters laptop not existing etc

I disagree it’s also good for old movies as well as a lot of stern stuff is uncensored there but I’m a stern fanatic I understand that doesn’t matter to a lot of people. It also has a lot of great old books, like that Hitchens book on Iraq is on there for free and that’s one of his I don’t have physically. But yea news is good too agree. It can help check the real history, like how Republicans are now down playing Jan 6th and prefer to not talk about it all but these same people we saying how horrible and unprecedented it was as the time

 

[j.f.🔎]

Btw just because your reaction score is whatever it is doesn’t mean you’re not a bully because bullies can be popular because we are an ape social mammal species and it shows. My problem isn’t you don’t like my post, I can survive if some people don’t like my post. My problem is that you are a slimeball weasel who i just know is a timid punk irl who hides behind his keyboard because everyone like you is like that irl.



what conspiracy? like Illuminati shit? be careful not to cling to or believe in a theory that explains to much because it’s always (amost) wrong

You're not getting it Eric, I'm not saying it's me that is popular, I'm not, believe or not there's not just you that hates me being here, I'm saying you are unpopular, like almost gurgled unpopular, it's borderline ridiculous how fucking shit you are.

But that's your problem not mine.

 

[Dirl]

I can survive if some people don’t like my post.

Retarded piece of shit.

 

[D.O.A.]

like how Republicans are now down playing Jan 6th and prefer to not talk about it all but these same people we saying how horrible and unprecedented it was as the time

Tell me more about that time an unarmed furry and some flag wavers took over the capitol building and threatened the entire united states "democratic" process with a coup d'état, the complete overthrow of the US government with zero military assistance. It's one of the greatest fantasy novels democrats have ever written. You know what was damaged? Some windows and Pelosi's teeth, which she left in a glass of water in her office.

 

[Christopher Hitchens]

Retarded piece of shit.

View attachment 832443

You are a psycho dirl

Tell me more about that time an unarmed furry and some flag wavers took over the capitol building and threatened the entire united states "democratic" process with a coup d'état, the complete overthrow of the US government with zero military assistance. It's one of the greatest fantasy novels democrats have ever written. You know what was damaged? Some windows and Pelosi's teeth, which she left in a glass of water in her office.

The proud boys were there and planning to, Trump tried to get the vice president to go along with the plot. I don’t have a lot of time now to do this argument, tonight when I’m home maybe, but I will say this. You seem to think that because most people in trumps administration wouldn’t go along with his plot, that that make it or Trump any better. The man who deliberately tried to get the AG and Vice president to not do their constitutional duty and cerify electors that were not legitimate Electoral college people. That Trump had to bring shady outside lawyers to do this crap. They were doing stuff for months it wasn’t just a riot on Jan 6th. That’s bullshit, and I can find you Mike Johnson say how horrible it was but now he downplays it. I’m sick of this policy of conciliation in America because the worst criminals and crooks and traitors get off Scott free. Trump is the candidate and he is central to this plot!!! Don’t vote traitor even though his damage of the Republican Party will go on after him but that’s for people on the right to work out how they will repair this damage.

 

[Dirl]

You are a psycho dirl

Sucks being you.

 

[Norme DePlume]

You are a psycho dirl

Sucks being you.

View attachment 832734

An Elegy for Direlwanger Dirl

In the loneliest depths of the web, where the shadows play,
Skulks Dirlewanger, or Dirl, a twisted and sad closeted gay.
A troll with a heart cloaked with anger, fear and spite,
Feebly insulting all he engages, desperate for a fight.

A keyboard warrior, wielding a small, unsharpened sword.
Inept at his obsessive cyber hobby, a cowardly fraud.
His words dull daggers, only dared uttered online,
Yet despite launching flame wars, Dirl flees every single time.

When return insults like arrows come swift through the night,
He crumples and scatters, a plucked chicken taking flight.
To bunkers of silence, he runs away to the battle's rear,
A craven invertebrate troll, with a milksop's heart beating in fear.

“Please notice me!” he shouts from his lonely hovel,
He pretends to be a hero, but is an old lady born to grovel.
He dreams of a life of glory, respect and something more,
But when faced with real competition, he backs out the door.

He thrives in the flame wars, the heat of the verbal clash,
At first bantering ineptly yet bravely, he savors each match.
But when the tide turns, and better return insults start to roll,
He feigns disinterest in the cutting witticisms searing his soul.

“Didn’t bother reading your reply,” Dirl smugly retorts,
As if their words lost their power, as if he tires of the sport.
Suddenly Dirl's active social life calls, he tells an obvious lie:
"I remember a pressing social engagement. I really must fly."

Dirlewanger haunts the forums, to fill his lonely nights,
Crafting his chaos, but perversely fleeing from all fights,
But beneath all the bravado, a sorrow runs deep,
Over a loss that still haunts him, robbing his sleep.

For Dirl's beloved "Big John" blow up sex doll, his treasured lover,
Never mocking his micopenis, for Dirl there could be no other.
His plastic companion was perfect, with realistic facial stubble.
Alas, their shack burned down, and it melted under the rubble.

In the depths of the net, where the sad and lonely convene,
Dirl mourns his losses and dwells in illusions, a sorrowful scene.
For behind every harsh comment, each inept jibe and jeer,
Hides a twisted monster, a moronic troll crippled with fear.

Still, one should pity him, being born to the Portuguese Dirlewangers,
His Múmia kept trying to abort him, eventually they hid the coathangers.
She had little time for him, dock whoring is a demanding profession,
Little wonder Dirl flees the trauma, hence his inept trolling obsession.

Such twisted memories of childhood, from which Dirl can't escape,
His father’s perverse abuse, paternal love expressed via kiddie rape.
Clinging to family traditions, Papai eschewed to use lubrications,
Understandable, if your lineage suffered micropenises for generations.

Dirl's repressed anger erupts like a pimple of festering rage,
Behind all his posts, you see the sad clown weeping on the cyber stage.
When bravado and sneers fade, Dirl's suicide is the inevitable outcome,
Psychologically, who could bend over forever waiting for Papai to cum?

 

[Christopher Hitchens]

An Elegy for Direlwanger Dirl

In the loneliest depths of the web, where the shadows play,
Skulks Dirlewanger, or Dirl, a twisted and sad closeted gay.
A troll with a heart cloaked with anger, fear and spite,
Feebly insulting all he engages, desperate for a fight.

A keyboard warrior, wielding a small, unsharpened sword.
Inept at his obsessive cyber hobby, a cowardly fraud.
His words dull daggers, only dared uttered online,
Yet despite launching flame wars, Dirl flees every single time.

When return insults like arrows come swift through the night,
He crumples and scatters, a plucked chicken taking flight.
To bunkers of silence, he runs away to the battle's rear,
A craven invertebrate troll, with a milksop's heart beating in fear.

“Please notice me!” he shouts from his lonely hovel,
He pretends to be a hero, but is an old lady born to grovel.
He dreams of a life of glory, respect and something more,
But when faced with real competition, he backs out the door.

He thrives in the flame wars, the heat of the verbal clash,
At first bantering ineptly yet bravely, he savors each match.
But when the tide turns, and better return insults start to roll,
He feigns disinterest in the cutting witticisms searing his soul.

“Didn’t bother reading your reply,” Dirl smugly retorts,
As if their words lost their power, as if he tires of the sport.
Suddenly Dirl's active social life calls, he tells an obvious lie:
"I remember a pressing social engagement. I really must fly."

Dirlewanger haunts the forums, to fill his lonely nights,
Crafting his chaos, but perversely fleeing from all fights,
But beneath all the bravado, a sorrow runs deep,
Over a loss that still haunts him, robbing his sleep.

For Dirl's beloved "Big John" blow up sex doll, his treasured lover,
Never mocking his micopenis, for Dirl there could be no other.
His plastic companion was perfect, with realistic facial stubble.
Alas, their shack burned down, and it melted under the rubble.

In the depths of the net, where the sad and lonely convene,
Dirl mourns his losses and dwells in illusions, a sorrowful scene.
For behind every harsh comment, each inept jibe and jeer,
Hides a twisted monster, a moronic troll crippled with fear.

Still, one should pity him, being born to the Portuguese Dirlewangers,
His Múmia kept trying to abort him, eventually they hid the coathangers.
She had little time for him, dock whoring is a demanding profession,
Little wonder Dirl flees the trauma, hence his inept trolling obsession.

Such twisted memories of childhood, from which Dirl can't escape,
His father’s perverse abuse, paternal love expressed via kiddie rape.
Clinging to family traditions, Papai eschewed to use lubrications,
Understandable, if your lineage suffered micropenises for generations.

Dirl's repressed anger erupts like a pimple of festering rage,
Behind all his posts, you see the sad clown weeping on the cyber stage.
When bravado and sneers fade, Dirl's suicide is the inevitable outcome,
Psychologically, who could bend over forever waiting for Papai to cum?

That was beautiful

 

[Irondingo]

This is like quasi-news I guess, semi-news but it was really interesting as a history lover so I thought I’d post it.

Full article from Business Insider:

“The long-promised digital apocalypse has finally arrived, and it was heralded by a blog post.

Published on July 18, the post's headline sounded pretty arcane. "Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available," it declared. I know, I know — not exactly an attack of alien zombies from the death dimension. But the news nevertheless freaked me out. It means another swath of the web is about to disappear.

Here's the gist: Google used to have an online service that generated pithy, user-friendly versions of long, commercially unwieldy uniform resource locators — the key addresses that identify everything on the web. Shorter URLs are easier to track and better for online commerce. Google stopped shortening addresses back in 2019, but the concise URLs it had already created kept right on doing their job. Click on one and it would take you to the right webpage, the way it's supposed to.

No more. In the blog post, Google announced that as of next year, all of the existing shortened URLs are getting turned off. Poof. And on the web, if your URL doesn't work, you might as well not exist. You are unreachable. Without laborious renaming, everything behind those links — billions of them, a decade of digital content — will become inaccessible. Gone. Ask not for whom the 404 message tolls.

Now, rendering a bunch of web content invisible isn't the end of days. Not by itself. The problem is, this kind of thing keeps happening. And it's getting worse. Social networks go bankrupt. Digital journalism sitesclose up shop. Companies pull their online products. Links rot. Files get not found. The cloud, as wags have noted, is really just "someone else's computers." And when clouds get turned off, not even the silver lining is left to tell the tale.

Maybe none of this matters much right now. But it will. The internet has become the default archive of our history and culture. And the whole thing is burning down before our eyes, like the Library of Alexandria — only worse. For the first time since people started carving letters into rocks, we're making a time with no history. We're about to enter the Digital Dark Ages.



Attempts to quantify the scope of the problem are heartbreaking. Half of links in US Supreme Court decisions no longer lead to the information being cited. A report in 2021 found that a full quarter of the more than 2.2 million hyperlinks on The New York Times website were broken. Even worse, the Pew Research Center estimates that a quarter of everything put on the web from 2013 to 2023 is inaccessible — meaning almost 40% of the web as it existed in 2013 is simply not there today, a decade later.

The degradation of those links wouldn't panic me so much if they hadn't replaced what came before them — if museum storerooms and dusty library stacks still served as the warehouses of our collective memory. It's not that I miss the days of wrangling with old newspapers preserved on microfiche, or trying to sweet-talk a librarian into an international interlibrary loan. I'm glad lots of old movies are streaming and many out-of-print books are only a few clicks away. But archives and databases are more than places to keep old stuff; what we save defines who we are. Today, so much of everything is only digital that when it disappears, it leaves a hole in our shared culture.

Gawker is gone. So is the archive of The Awl, the beloved culture-criticism site. You can go to a library and read the entire output of long-dead newspapers like the Los Angeles Herald Examiner or New York Newsday, but God help you if you want to read old Vice articles. Shenanigans over the ownership of what used to be Paramount have resulted in the deletion of decades' worth of shows on MTV and Comedy Central.

The Cartoon Network archive is gone. So are Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Answers, big chunks of the Imgur photo service, the spicy parts of Tumblr that got zapped in a porn purge, everything that ever happened on Friendster and the other pre-Facebook social networks, Club Penguin, Neopets, Geocities, AOL, and Prodigy. Vast swaths of video games made for obsolete systems are unplayable memories.

Hard drives have a finite lifespan, and the ones the music industry used for storage in the 1990s ahead of the transition to digital are crumbling. The Department of Veterans Affairs is legally required to preserve all medical records for 75 years after the death of a vet — but it's having problems, in part because of a balky digital records system. And that's not to mention things like personal photographs, most of which now exist only on your phone, and nowhere else. Every email you sent or received in your last job, or anything a deceased relative had on their now-unusable computer? These are the things that make us us. Yet I dare you to find them.



There are always brave souls out there who try to rescue scrolls from a burning library. But it's hard to rescue something that exists only in the ether. "If a library burns down, it's a tragedy, but most of the books survive elsewhere," says Mark Graham, a leading internet archivist. "But the digital world is inherently fragile and potentially ephemeral."

Graham is director of the Wayback Machine, a decades-old project that seeks to collect and save digital copies of web pages, for posterity. Gawker? Yeah, they got most of it. And that Pew study I mentioned, which showed that more than a third of the recent internet had vanished? "When we redid their study using their data, we found that about two-thirds of that material was safely stored on the Wayback Machine," Graham says. "So really only a ninth is gone."

“As we store our lives on our devices, we're actively choosing to punch huge gaps in our historical record. It's self-inflicted cultural amnesia.”

The Wayback Machine automatically archives more than a billion URLs every day. It also performs constant maintenance on the hundreds of millions of links across all 320 language editions of Wikipedia, which are atrophying at a rate of 10,000 URLs a day. Most recently, Graham worked on preserving 5,000 videos from a YouTube channel run by Rohingya activists, whose people were subjected to genocide in 2017. "They asked us to archive it because YouTube regularly deletes videos from their platform," Graham says. "They don't even leave metadata up, so you don't know what was deleted." He says he got all of the videos except one, which was age-restricted.

Usually, the Wayback Machine's biggest obstacle is paywalls. Most of the articles in the world's scientific journals, for example, are widely available to anyone with a university affiliation. But the articles are prohibitively expensive for the rest of us — even if our tax dollars paid for the research they describe. An archive isn't really an archive if no one can afford the entry fee.

But now there's a new threat to archiving our lives: artificial intelligence. When websites don't want to let AI slurp up their content, they block a certain kind of digital crawler-bot — the same species of critter the Wayback Machine uses. "That's happened almost overnight," Graham says. AI, with its insatiable hunger for training data, can't access the sites. But neither can the preservationists. In the wake of artificial intelligence, more intelligence is going to vanish.



Let's be clear: This is about more than just losing a few news articles or clips from your favorite Adult Swim cartoon. What an archive is able to save, down to what formats fit in its file cabinets or data banks, literally determines what gets remembered. If you preserve, say, bank records from the 18th century but not sewing patterns, your annals are going to leave out a lot of people. Similarly, if your digital archive retains only the records of profitable businesses — because the ones that go bust wind up nuking their servers — you lose the memory of everything those deceased companies labored for. And what gets remembered about the past determines what we're able to do in the present. "Society is memory," says Marlene Manoff, who served as a senior collection strategist at MIT Libraries. "When you lose that memory, what does that mean?"

Unreadable hard drives and vanishing links aren't the only threats to the historical record. Consider the selfie. Fifteen years ago, a researcher from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography named Loren McClenachan wanted to know whether commercial overfishing and environmental changes were making fish smaller. So she looked at five decades' worth of pictures of winning sportfishing catchesoff Key West, Florida. The fishing boat company that ran the competitions, it turned out, had kept all the physical photographs, most of which had the date handwritten on the back.

Armed with those artifacts, McClenachan was able to show that over the prior half-century, the sizes of prize-winning catches had declined by more than 50%. None of that data would have been available if all the fishers had kept the records of their catches on their phones. Instead we'd be subject to what's known as "shifting baseline syndrome" — the common assumption that whatever's normal today was the norm in the past, too.

As the internet vanishes and we store our lives on our devices, we're actively choosing to punch huge gaps in our historical record. It's self-inflicted cultural amnesia, made worse by the fact that most of the web is in the hands of large corporations that place little value on preservation. "Over the long term, you can't preserve a digital object in its original form," says Manoff, the former MIT librarian. "But in the case of corporate ownership, the likelihood of responsible long-term stewardship of digital content in any form becomes increasingly unlikely."

The Dark Ages, as historians used to call the early centuries of medieval Europe, lasted for 500 years. Our digital version may never end. A postliterate society leaves exactly as much of a mark on the world as a preliterate one. Which is to say, not much of a mark at all.”



No paywall version of article: https://www.smry.ai/proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.businessinsider.com%2Fdigital-dark-ages-internet-history-old-websites-disappearing-link-rot-2024-10



Original: https://www.businessinsider.com/digital-dark-ages-internet-history-old-websites-disappearing-link-rot-2024-10

So no more Myspace? What will happen to my only friend Tom?

 

[Richard 1986]

This is why you have hard copies...View attachment 830807
...Or just commit the murders yourself.

Faces of death are all on Youtube

 

[Irondingo]

You are a psycho dirl


The proud boys were there and planning to, Trump tried to get the vice president to go along with the plot. I don’t have a lot of time now to do this argument, tonight when I’m home maybe, but I will say this. You seem to think that because most people in trumps administration wouldn’t go along with his plot, that that make it or Trump any better. The man who deliberately tried to get the AG and Vice president to not do their constitutional duty and cerify electors that were not legitimate Electoral college people. That Trump had to bring shady outside lawyers to do this crap. They were doing stuff for months it wasn’t just a riot on Jan 6th. That’s bullshit, and I can find you Mike Johnson say how horrible it was but now he downplays it. I’m sick of this policy of conciliation in America because the worst criminals and crooks and traitors get off Scott free. Trump is the candidate and he is central to this plot!!! Don’t vote traitor even though his damage of the Republican Party will go on after him but that’s for people on the right to work out how they will repair this damage.

So what of Ray Epps? He seemed more the rebel rouser. He was never brought to trial. We all have our own convictions. Jan 6 was admitted by Pelosi to be her fault. She refused Trump's offer of the national guard. The Dems jumped on it trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. Another Trump smear campaign. Anybody that could support the Democrats after the last 4 years is brainwashed. And there was plenty of evidence of election interference in the 2020 election. More than 50% of Americans have seen the proof and believe it. Laken Riley did not need to die to prove how corrupt the Democrats are. Covering up for Bidens senility while Obama puppeteers from his basement in his sweats. Dont forget about Kamala's Bluetooth earrings she never took off. Funny how Biden isn't mentally fit to stand trial for his crimes but he's fit enough to pardon 1500 criminals and his son. If you support all that you are on the wrong side of the tracks bud.

 

[Christopher Hitchens]

Faces of death are all on Youtube

Yes but a hard copy is nice to me. It’s like I prefer books to E-books. Original hard copies.

So what of Ray Epps? He seemed more the rebel rouser. He was never brought to trial. We all have our own convictions. Jan 6 was admitted by Pelosi to be her fault. She refused Trump's offer of the national guard. The Dems jumped on it trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. Another Trump smear campaign. Anybody that could support the Democrats after the last 4 years is brainwashed. And there was plenty of evidence of election interference in the 2020 election. More than 50% of Americans have seen the proof and believe it. Laken Riley did not need to die to prove how corrupt the Democrats are. Covering up for Bidens senility while Obama puppeteers from his basement in his sweats. Dont forget about Kamala's Bluetooth earrings she never took off. Funny how Biden isn't mentally fit to stand trial for his crimes but he's fit enough to pardon 1500 criminals and his son. If you support all that you are on the wrong side of the tracks bud.

Go to my thread whose title is “Trump is an orange traitor”. That is my reply to what you just said.

As for ray epps I didn’t even remember who that is. There is an unproven conspiracy theory that he is a fed. Nonsense and even if that were true the proud boys were there to break in a texts and emails prove this. It can all be looked up in the congressional report which is in the thread I referenced.

https://www.congress.gov/congressional-report/117th-congress/house-report/544/1

I think this debate is useful:

 

[Richhhead]

What happened to kick ass torrents. I remember the first porn site I surfed kept hold on that never thought there would be millions now lol glasses dot com yea the good ol days