For the people rather whimsically called “digital natives” there are few things more troublesome than something being taken down from the internet. It’s true, the old adage says “the internet never forgets”, but perhaps a more accurate version of it is “The internet never forgets, unless you want it to remember. ” Many a data hoarder will tell you this while basking on the magnificent glow of their NAS, filled with content that would’ve been lost to the concept of mu otherwise.
But for everyone unwilling or unable to locally everything of their interest, there’s the perennial good guy of the internet: the internet archive. As comprehensive a record as it can possibly be, over the years it has become host to a treasure trove of media that would be lost otherwise. Not to mention become a library and data repository so good that book publishers have gotten it into their heads their world would be a better place if it was a little bit worse.
Way to help the case of corporate interests aligning with the greater good you guys. However, it highlights just how important it has become since its inception in 1996 and how important it is to preserve it.
We were just reminded of how much of a cornerstone it has become than last week, when there was an unexpected outage. All of a sudden the vacuum left by 48 Petabates of resources made itself distressingly present. Even with a tweet reassuring us about of the outage, a sample of its disappearance was felt by anyone who wanted to see the solution to a problem that would’ve otherwise been lost with the death of a forum, or gained access to an abandonware game that was resurrected and was now available in your browser. Not to mention media and document dumps whose only reason to exist is that someone took painstaking care to digitalize and upload for no other reason than to make humanity’s collective library of information a little bit more complete.
So, to you and my other reader, allow me to use this space, for once, to encourage you to make a donation to the internet archive. However much is between you, them, and the government agents currently set up to oversee you.
Quite frankly there’s a nonzero chance they’ll also donate to it, especially if they bungle their data collection and need to recover captures of the websites you’ve visited from somewhere. As for me, I actually went back and found a series of stories that had almost disappeared from the internet. Some of those where following the link gets you the kind of 404 page where you’re sure that the server providing it to you is a Pentium II that has probably been walled in two house renovations ago and the current owners have no idea about what’s causing the ghost 100W or so powerdraw. One day it won’t even be able to provide that 404, especially if the previous owner finally cancels the automatic debit and the site is finally taken out of life support.
Thanks to the internet archive, we’ll be ready
