When the internet isn’t forever

deleted or lost, stories that matter are becoming unfindable

The other day I was looking up a feature I’d written for Serious Eats in 2020 and realized it wasn’t on their website anymore. The article, on the role of community gardens during the pandemic, was a notable selection in Best American Food Writing 2021. I was proud of my work on it which included photographs I took and published along with the piece. I interviewed a number of people in my local Bhutanese community about why their garden plots mattered to them. Those voices, too, have been lost.

I went to the Wayback Machine—a trusted source for recovering deleted internet history—it had never been there either. Other than a document on my computer and some emails with my editor, the feature was gone. Vanished. As though it had never been there at all. The only thing that exists is a brief blurb on my website with a link leading nowhere.

A Cuneiform tablet with a written inventory account. Babylonian from 7th-6th century BCE. Courtesy of The Met Museum.

I’ve always been a big saver. I still have old school books and photos and letters from pen pals I wrote to when I was ten. When it comes to letters, my only regret is that I didn’t save even more. What about the notes I passed in class or friends left in my mailbox? What about the emails I sent in high school? What about my Gmail archive? (I realized six years ago that Google had randomly deleted every email I wrote before 2013.)

So after being told repeatedly as a teen that “what happens on the internet is forever” it’s strange to find out that this isn’t exactly the case. My Myspace profile—for better or worse—is gone forever. So are the journal entries friends and I posted online.

I came to freelance writing during the 2010s, in hindsight, a boom period for internet writing. Tech hopefuls poured tons of money into longform or print publications only later realizing that journalism wasn’t going to become the next Facebook. I’ve lost count of the places I’ve written for that have closed down: Lucky Peach, Modern Farmer, Topic, NPR’s The Salt, among my favorites. Some of them live on in archives or print issues. Others have simply disappeared and closed the door behind them. It’s a nice thing about wanting to write books which, of course, can go out of print but circulate by the hundreds or thousands even after their “death”.

An account of a blanket delivery. Babylonian from 605 BCE. Courtesy of The Met Museum.

It’s not a new problem. Back when newspapers were physical, reporters had to cut out and save their clips or issues of magazines they’d written for in order to save their work. Newspapers kept rooms dedicated to archives of past issues—and what happened when they closed down? Some things have always gotten lost.

But I think, when items were physical, we had a better sense of what we were doing when we threw out an archival copy. For too long I lived with the vague sense that anything I’d written would always just be a click away. It’s only recently that I’ve started saving anything I write as a PDF so I know it will never get lost. The Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive are incredible resources but they don’t archive everything and even they may not be forever.

Whereas people knew what they were doing when they threw out a clip of an old article or a magazine issue, online links and websites and entire publications now disappear before anyone has time to save them. A Harvard Law School study found that half of all hyperlinks in New York Times stories had been broken, no longer bringing readers to anything at all.

As s.e. smith wrote in a piece for The Verge about digital decay,

“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?”

But there are deeper concerns about the ephemerality of the internet than the potential loss of an article I wrote about people who collect and sell Flaming Hot Cheetos (now saved as a PDF).

An acount of barley disbursements. Babylonian from 577 BCE. Courtesy of The Met Museum.

For decades, the internet has represented “the first draft of history” as Niemen Reports put it. In an age where fake news was a problem even before AI revisions of reality, the possibility that records of “what really happened” could be deleted forever is chilling.

Dictatorships have a long history of purposefully erasing or revising history. Every social studies class I ever took in school spoke of the value of knowing our past and learning lessons from it.

With the changes to Google search, which unravel a once-great research tool into an AI-generated answer and a couple links, viewpoints are already being compressed into one reduced and simplified truth. It might be convenient to be presented with one easy narrative but history has always been complex and full of different viewpoints. What happens when we forget they even exist?

It’s not like searching was easy in a pre-internet age. I’ve had the pleasure of using microfiche to research a feature—another article that only lives in the Wayback Machine—sitting in a library, scrolling for hours while I took notes by hand. I remember being amazed that someone had taken the time to save and archive the court transcripts I was using, the details I needed to make this story come alive. Even if they only existed in a handful of libraries, it was enough.

On the internet, data is everywhere and so we rarely take the time to save it somewhere specific. It’s time we started treating our online writing with as much preciousness as we would for a treasured film photo or a handwritten letter from a friend. Once it’s gone, everything is irreplaceable.

Image of a child laborer at a South Carolina cotton mill taken by Lewis Hine in 1908. It was part of a series by the National Child Labor Committee which they shared in an effort to pass child labor laws. Imagine if it had been lost or erased from the archives.

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Notes:

I’d announced last week that my next newsletter was going to be about books but, well, sometimes an essay just lands in your lap. This newsletter isn’t exactly full of breaking news but some pieces are more evergreen than others.

For the five of you who might be really sad to have to wait even longer, I will share a book recommendation. If you feel bad you haven’t read the classics but want something that is an absolute banger, I highly recommend Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence. I read it with my book club and we all loved it. It’s funny, it’s full of descriptions of decor and fashion, (did you know Edith Wharton’s first big book was about interior design and architecture?? True story!), the female characters are fascinating and complex. It is a classic you will absolutely enjoy!

I’m so glad I’ve read it and can now watch the 1993 movie adaptation starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, and Michelle Pfeiffer.

Until next week,

what do you want to save?

-Tove

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