Back when I was young and so were the world and the internet, I was fascinated by the concept of internet logbooks. I just thought they were the coolest thing in the world. Imagine, I thought, many many years from now someone will look at this logbook and amongst all the entries, mine will be there. Just like how those people on the television shows in England can trace their family all the way back to a dairy seller in 1345. And with the visitors counter at the bottom of the page, they could also see how many people have visited since.
Needless to say that suddenly, and pretty much without my noticing it, all of the websites that had logbooks disappeared or got renovated to where they didn’t have it; my name alongside thousands of others sacrificed uncaringly to the aether. It was a powerful lesson on entropy, the uncertainty of the future and that things on the internet, for all their perceived permanence, are very much “here today, gone tomorrow” and should be treated as such.
It’s not entirely by accident that I have started thinking about old logbooks. Weird life events have made me go to some rather older sections of the internet. The ones where static content wasn’t done to increase performance and the pages are either full width or designed for monitors displaying content at 800x600 at most. The content I’ve found is beautiful. Made by the old grandmasters of the internet and covering everything from amusing anecdotes from the faraway land of 1995 to beautifully succinct treatises on what it actually means to use a computer and how it relates to the human condition.
I also found a million dead links. In fact, I think I may be privileged in being one of the few users of the internet on the last few days to be on the corner where at least one of every four links is dead through no particular fault. Things just get old. Pages move away. Sites get redesigned. Links Rot. Wikipedia was absolutely right when they started doing archive.org links.
There’s something profoundly eerie about the way we use the internet. Well, no, there are many things that are that, but it is a bit sobering to realize how easily decades of information can just go away. Ask anyone with an old Myspace profile, or the people who went to find an FTP owned by a friend has died, and they will not rebuild it with a public opening anymore. This very website has never made a profit. We are here because we’re still worth enough for someone to keep the lights on. But unless they are feeling especially charitable, they will eventually cut their losses. It has happened before, and it will happen again. Permanence on the internet is only as stable as human resolve and your ability to pay a domain name.
Memento Mori: Not just for humans anymore.
