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The internet is not forever
Plus, all culture is dopamine addiction now?
Crystal Andrews
February 25, 2024
Folks, I’m scared. Late Thursday, the CEO of Vice announced the digital publication is essentially shutting down. The company will lay off several hundred employees around the world, and going forward will no longer publish stories on its website. There are rumours (at the time of writing, these are unconfirmed) that Vice dot com will be deleted entirely. There is a huge difference between not publishing any new work to the website and removing everything that’s already there! Current and former journalists are apparently scrambling to download their stories to preserve the work they’ve produced for Vice over the years.
This is distressing to me as a media entrepreneur and journalist because it’s yet another awful example of just how much VCs have abused, battered and broken media… but that’s not why I’m writing about this for you.
When purely digital media outlets (like Vice) get deleted, there is no remaining public record of the journalism that was produced. This is supposed to be the information age! The NSW State Library has every copy of the Sydney Morning Herald from 1842 to now, the Times from 1788. How do we preserve knowledge that has been exclusively published and shared online?
Despite what we’ve been told (digital footprints etc etc) the Internet is not permanent. Journalist Paris Martineau points out that ‘link rot’ or ‘link death’ – broken hyperlinks that no longer contain relevant or any information at all – is already happening much faster than you might think. “It doesn't take long for the rot to take hold. One 2021 analysis found that external links in NYT articles had a half-life of ~15 years.” That’s not a lot of time for an original source to just… disappear.
There are initiatives that are trying to preserve the web. Australia has one of the biggest web archives in the world, which started in 1996 and focuses on Australian sites. You can search the archives through Trove, the online platform of the National Library of Australia. Internet Archive runs the Wayback Machine, which also started archiving in 1996 and currently has snapshots of 835 billion webpages.
Will these be enough to store what we know? I don’t know. Will they be targeted in digital wars, the same way universities and libraries are targeted in wars in the physical world? Almost certainly. Preserving the web is as precarious, imperfect and important as preserving physical records. Sometimes, deleting websites really is like burning books.
What happens as we move forward without accurate or adequate records of this time? This isn’t a new problem, but it’s a problem nonetheless. Especially when you consider a) print media is in serious decline, and b) there is a huge difference in how legacy media and online media approach the same topics and news events. Imagine if in 100 years from today, the only source a person had to learn about Israel’s current attacks on Gaza was… Australian newspapers. The most important reporting has come from individual citizen journalists and shared on privately-owned tech platforms (TikTok, Twitter, Meta) – if these companies cease to exist in the next 50 years, will any of these witness accounts remain?
Internet researcher and writer Aidan Walker says: “In 2040, we might be in a situation where we know more about what happened in 1980 than we do about what happened in 2020.” That applies to losing online journalism in places like Vice and Zee Feed, and also losing digital artefacts from your own life – photos, videos, voice notes, memories that have been uploaded to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Google Drive or hard drives, but exist nowhere else.
The Vice collapse is giving me the push I needed to start the long overdue project of printing out photos from the past 15 years of my life, to keep in physical photo albums. If you’re a fellow journo, please also take this as a sign to get PDFs of any online bylines you haven’t already archived. Keep your own, offline records of anything that’s important to you – the internet is not forever.
Good stuff on Zee Feed rn:
“It’s high time we recognize the correlation between economic stability and mental well-being and work towards solutions that address both aspects. Only then can we hope to create a society where mental health is valued and nurtured.” CLICK HERE TO READ.
Smart stuff on the Internet 💭
All the stuff I found on the web that made me think, smile, or have an ‘aha!’ moment. Spend your Sunday reading them – you'll be better off for it:
Saying That Taylor Swift Is ‘Just For White Girls’ Is Dismissive on Refinery29
I wrote this one! "While Swift’s style won’t suit everyone’s tastes, the idea that non-white women could never relate to her songs is at best dismissive and at worse, dangerous. Believing that Black, brown or Asian girls don’t experience emotions the same way as white girls quickly slides into dehumanisation – the foundation of white supremacist thinking."
The State of the Culture, 2024 on The Honest Broker substack
Super interesting thesis by American critic Ted Goia about how and why mainstream entertainment has changed: “Only now [the dopamine loop] is getting applied to culture and the creative world—and billions of people… So you need to ditch that simple model of art versus entertainment. And even ‘distraction’ is just a stepping stone toward the real goal nowadays—which is addiction.”
US intelligence casts doubt on Israeli claims of UNRWA-Hamas links, report says on the Guardian
The latest in this story confirms that Australia, the US etc cut funding to UNWRA based on no evidence: “According to the Wall Street Journal, the intelligence report, released last week, assessed with ‘low confidence’ that a handful of staff had participated in the attack… though it could not independently confirm their veracity. It added that Israel has not ‘shared the raw intelligence behind its assessments with the US.’”