'Remember the Internet': An Encyclopedia of Online Life
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I am older than the usual skew of the HN demographic and I can only say that a lot of this feels like surfing or stepping off of one escalator and onto another. Yes, you can do it smoothly but at some point the endless transition from one thing to another feels shallow, and the gossamer threads of personal relationships between you and someone else on a vanishing Internet community snapping might only be heard by the smallest of web spiders. Businesses shutter, call some place Paradise and kiss it goodbye, new moderators decide to "pivot" or the gentle incoming surf of Eternal September rises like a tsunami and washes it all away.
We may have become perversely attached to the impermanence of things and, if so, may be then treating one another with less depth than can be kind. Nobody names mayflies.
One piece of the early internet that I do grieve for is a MUD I played in the 90s. I remember when I first found it, and it was the only MUD I ever played.
I had heard about this awesome new game called Ultima Online, and there were some great blogs telling stories from the Alpha release. I signed up for the Beta (don't think I ever was accepted?) but in the meantime I scoured UO forums and that's where I found that MUD. I think I honestly only played it for about 2 years but those were absolutely some of the most fun times I ever had on the internet. I think at max the server only had 30 or 40 people on it, and the codebase must have been absolute garbage because it would lag out periodically and you'd lose connection or get killed.
I really wish that place had survived, or in the very least I wish it had been documented. Such an amazing thing, it makes me sad to think about.
Nowadays, we've come to appreciate the fact that things will disappear off the internet, and people are preserving them. I know, like the article, "it's not the same," and you can't go back in time by just viewing a site on the wayback machine. I'm still glad that people are doing this kind of work, preserving these stories.
In this vein, I can also recommend this Bloomberg series on the History of Napster. Kind of amazing how stubborn music industry execs and politicians can remain 20 years on. How prescient Steve Jobs was, yet again. And whether the days when a solitary coder in a dorm room could still disrupt an entire industry will be much more insurmountable ;)
[0] Yes Facebook is very much alive, and everyone I know has an account, but nobody actively uses the platform, and it feels completely vestigial at this point.*
Best of luck to them.
I know I am curious and history books leave more questions than answers. Even the most well preserved facts about kings/dynasties/wars are partial at best and leave out so many interesting things out...
My feeling is that archeologists et al would love 10x or 1000x more data about what happened in the past -- not to have to guess everything and never be sure "is that really what happened?"
An awful lot of digging into people's past online is done for mean-spirited reasons like finding something to embarrass them.
They might say something like:
There is no 'online life'. There's just life, and technology is a huge part of it. Often, the most important part.
The exports are garbage, though. What good is an archive of my comments when they don't contain any of the rest of the conversation, or even information about what they were in response to?
I'm literally looking at my FB comment export right now, and everything is "Tablespoon commented on his own post: Some sentence that makes little sense out of context."
It was easy. Now it is almost impossible to save your experience. Applications block copying text from messages eg. Instagram. Block you from downloading images eg. Google, and from saving videos (eg. Tiktok).
Today technology leans towards blocking people of having a recall of what they see, hear and read online. It is hard to not have the feeling that we are losing something each day forever.
Not being able to go back to something that i have experienced is a loss to me.
I hope there will be some change around it, because I think that a person experiencing something has the right to preserve the experience. It was a default law. But now it is taken away from us.
No one is however protesting not noticing some kind of very personal, natural freedom is slowly taken away from us. The freedom of having a memory.
The example that comes to mind personally is chat logs: I have a fairly complete record of IRC conversations. It's not like I read them daily, but it is often nice to be able to refer back to, especially if I'm shooting the shit with friends or something and we can't remember who was actually the best at AoEII LAN. These logs were produced by my client(s) by default.
That same friend group later migrated to Skype. I have no Skype logs at all, and there's a several-year gap in chat history before we ended up back on IRC. Could I have come up with some kind of logging solution? Probably, but I didn't, and now I'm sad about that and wish that the Skype client had been more aligned with my interests as a user, but I guess that's what I get for using proprietary software in the first place.
So yes, sure, you can technically screenshot everything if you try hard enough, but the location/accessibility of digital ephemera has definitely moved away from end-users, toward corporations, as centralization advanced and clients regressed from user-agents to informers.
Chat logs are just an example, and maybe not a very good one because of the pre-digital analogue you point out: let's try screenshots of gameplay. I used to use a third-party tool to take screenshots/clips and upload them to a server. I still have all the clips and pics from these. These days, that functionality is often part of whatever game service framework you're operating in. A while ago a friend's account got banned, and that wiped out all the screenshots and clips stored by the service. Centralization and moves away from open protocols makes it easier for that type of situation, where you don't actually own a copy of content you're creating, to come about.
Why are we sometimes curious what our great grandparents did, and why don't we just put our dead in the trash heap with the rest of our waste?
That's an extremely limited, pretty old-fashioned view of history. There was literally a post just the other day about Latin grammatical genders that mentioned that linguists obsess over a few fragments of graffiti because that's all that's left that hints at how Latin was actually spoken by the commoners whose speech became the Romance languages. Other historians spend their time studying contracts and receipts from transactions involving cattle and grain of long dead Sumerian traders. There are many schools of history that are more concerned with how common people lived in ordinary and extraordinary times than great men and "important events" (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History#Social_history). An important function of history is satisfying people's curiosity about the past.
For example, we consider valuable early writing on clay tablets that refers to accounting records, recipes and personal letters of ancient Mesopotamia (e.g. https://www.archaeology.org/issues/214-features/cuneiform/43...) which provide insight on how these people lived even if they provide no information on any specific major event.
One unique problem of our era is storing things digitally. If a huge event were to occur, wiping out humanity, archeologists won't be able to study ssds in thousands of years like we can study physical artifacts today.
In fact I've started the habit of deleting everything after a period of inactivity - be it computer history or social history - because it's either important and saved properly or it's not.
Certainly the world wouldn't loose heritage if random blogs, facebook, instagram, youtube went away, same as no one at large mourns the disappearance of usenet .. or myspace.
I don't know if I entirely agree. Historians of past eras work to piece together an understanding of the time based on scraps and fragments.
How rich might history be if we could see the views of tens of thousands of people, instead of hundreds?
Like you imply, the status quo for future generations looking back on this time will be no worse than what we have looking bad at the 18th century. In fact, it will be much better for future historians looking at the present. But there's a real potential to make it so much better!
The question to every answer.
¹ Only using him as an example because he is an influential person who used an online medium to communicate
Telepath is premised on post ephemerality and AFAICT also does not allow text cut and paste.
No stopping screen shots etc but ftr.
* that there is no stopping screen shots etc. is arguably the real topic; until such time as there is true revolt, surveillance capital renders inert any idea of personal invisibility, opting out, or avoidance of future accountability for contemporary actions, as you suggest.
As well known in this forum, there is no escape, not using incognito mode, not using TOR, not opting out of the sociopathic Facebook ecosystem which happily profiles you based on tagging and public data... we live in the panopticon.
Those of us who are not stainless steel rats should moderate our expectations accordingly. :|
Does such a thing exist?
I'm sitting here fighting urges to build a prototype.
There are people on mastodon/pleroma who have scripts that automatically do that for posts older than 30 days, etc.
Snapchat and instagram stories are ephemeral, but those are different from traditional social media with posts.