Pro Posteri

Everything gets old. Everything lives, dies,and then shits itself. Even the internet.

I had never heard of linkrot until today. However, I have always considered posterity and the preservation of information to be an important consideration and practice, be it for the creative individual, or the common cultural enthusiast alike.

As stated in the bio, this website is for the purpose of a personal content-addressable archive. This has already  become more useful as the internet, by way of your search results, transitions from a thing that looks the same for everyone to a thing that looks different depending on who you are.

Already feeds are tailored to your behavioral profile. Everything you see is alpha-beta'd to infinity. In common language, the United Airlines homepage looks way different depending on whether you're you or you're me.

That being said, boy was it a surprise to learn that someone out there had a way better and way more ambitious idea than me. They are the creators of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, and they have way stronger devotion to posterity than I.

Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive gave a talk at the 2018 Online News Association conference, detailing this careful and insatiable machine that gorges on terabytes of our cultural data daily (via Ars Technica).

What's more exciting, that they're archiving physical things like vinyl records and microfeche, or that they're archiving the entire internet, everyday. What? They have robots that have repaired over 6 million pages lost to linkrot. They screenshot the Google homepage every ten minutes*.

Or is it more exciting to know they've been at it for 22 years? Has the internet even been aorund for 22 years?? (Yes. AOL remembers).

Great quote taken from Ars comments section:
The Internet Archive isn't trying to merely scrape the web. It's trying to ensure that we have a record of the past that we can rely on in the future. -source

We may not readily notice its effects in our daily lives, but we should appreciate nonetheless that such obsessive, compulsive behavior exists. Our world changes faster than we do as individuals, and our memories change even faster than that. Without an unconditionally comprehensive, enduring, and accessible repository of our cultural artifacts, it becomes too easy to perpetuate the failings of lessons we have already paid for.

You would think as the good consumerists, Americans would not stand for such highway robbery. Then again, according to the Internet Archives donations, many people recognize it as a fair deal.

*Fun fact: Stephen Wolfram (Alpha) also screenshots his desktop every ten minutes, and that's not the end of his compulsive archiving behaviors. I revered this guy, only a little, bit before I discovered this. Now he's in the pantheon.


Notes:
The Internet’s keepers? “Some call us hoarders—I like to say we’re archivists”
Oct 2018, Ars Technica

They even have video games for goodness sake! It's called the Internet Arcade.

They offer other services, like comparing side by side the same page at two different times, or architectural diagrams that show how a site's structure has changed over time.


Post Script:
NSFW - leave it to the comments section to remind us that we can use this to view vintage porn. Leave it to me to remind you if you are now on archive.org, fantasizing along with an adult film from 1998, of let's say a 25-year-old couple, consider that they are now 45 years old. That's not strong enough. Get a video from the 70's. Those actors are now over 70.
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