This is something that keeps me worried at night. Unlike other historical artefacts like pottery, vellum writing, or stone tablets, information on the Internet can just blink into nonexistence when the server hosting it goes offline. This makes it difficult for future anthropologists who want to study our history and document the different Internet epochs. For my part, I always try to send any news article I see to an archival site (like archive.ph) to help collectively preserve our present so it can still be seen by others in the future.
Yeah it’s funny how I always got warned about how “the internet is forever” when it comes to being care about what you post on social media, which isn’t bad advice and is kinda true, but also really kinda not true. So many things I’ve wanted to find on the internet that I experienced like 15 years ago are just gone without a trace.
Things you want to disappear will last forever but things you want to keep will vanish
It should be revised to “the Internet can be forever”. There’s no control over what persists and what doesn’t, but some things really do get copied everywhere and live on in infamy.
The internet can be forever. If you mess up publicly enough, it will be forever (e.g. the aerial picture of Barbara Streisand’s villa)