IS THE INTERNET FOREVER?

some thoughts on the perceived permanence of the web

Something that was mentioned to me by Prof. Daisuke Endo while doing class-swapped thesis reviews is the common idea that ‘the internet is forever.’ We have all heard this idea, and it has been a tenement of basic internet safety for years now. Don’t put anything online that you wouldn’t want to be there forever. There are many examples of people posting something embarrassing, revealing, or generally not for public consumption online, and being unable to scrub it off the internet.

In 2003 Barbra Streisand attempted to sue a photographer who had posted an image containing an aerial view of her home. Her goal was to get the image taken down from the internet, but because of the media attention that was brought to the situation, the image was viewed, downloaded, and shared hundreds of thousands of times. Before the lawsuit, the original image had only been downloaded six times, two of those times being by Streisand’s own legal team¹. Now if you Google “Streisand effect,” the search results are flooded with the image that Barbra wanted deleted. This is objectively hilarious (unless you’re Barbra Streisand) but it is also a cautionary tale, a fable if you will, about how if you make a big stink about something being censored, it will only make that thing more widespread. The cells of the information multiplying in a carcinogenic manner, that you can’t radiate away.

Even if you aren’t a famous celebrity, internet privacy is still something to be concerned about. Say you post something on Instagram, and a few months later you decide it’s cringe and you delete it. As long as no one took a screenshot and posted it everywhere, you are basically free and clear, no one is going to see that post in the future (the post may still be stored on Instagram’s servers, at least for a little while, depending on the privacy laws of your country but it won’t appear on the front end for other people to see). However if someone else posts something embarrassing about you or reposts your original cringe take, there’s not a lot you can do to take it down. Several years ago the “Right to Be Forgotten” in regards to internet privacy entered the legal space and has been codified in many places, notably the EU. This protection gives citizens the right to have information truly deleted off of the web, and even removed from search engines. This rule mainly applies to truly compromising information that is dangerous to an individual being taken down or erased from a company's servers².

Okay so that was a lot of talking about stuff that is only tangentially related to the main ideas that I want you to think about. We want to have an understanding of why and how the internet can be ‘forever,’ before we talk about the ways that it can also be very much subject to decay. This idea of the stickiness of information on the web is not necessarily an issue of internet technology itself, but rather of people and the way that we interact via the internet. While it’s true that pushing hard to get something erased from the web may have the opposite effect, or that it’s nearly impossible to get something deleted from someone else’s profile, these are not effects of Internet Magic. They are the result of other internet users downloading that information and republishing it. It doesn’t happen to everything, and in fact there are many pieces of information which did not receive this treatment, and are therefore lost to time. In the grand scheme of my biological metaphor, this process of unerasable information is akin to fossilization. Although the original data may be deleted, a print of it still remains carved in stone.

Now I know what you’re thinking: “What about the Internet Archive? If I want to look at a website from 20 years ago, I can just go to the Wayback Machine and see it.” That is true, but the Internet Archive is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. When it was created in 1996, the Internet Archive was a response to web decay that was already happening³. The Wayback Machine is a wonderful tool of internet preservation. It operates partially on submission, but mainly by using web-crawlers, which scour, download, and index publicly available web information. It isn’t magic, and it isn’t able to capture every single thing. On top of that, if you’ve ever used the Wayback Machine, you know that it is not uncommon to see missing images, broken links, or non-functional script. These websites are preserved, and their information is accessible, but a lot of them are still in a decay-state. Of course, you can also make a request for snapshots to be removed from the public archive if they contain sensitive information like your address or phone number.

There are many organizations apart from just Internet Archive that are working to archive and preserve the information that is on the web. While on one hand I understand and support these efforts, I also am pushed to think about what is truly necessary to preserve, and what can be comfortably cast off into the sea of digital decay. There is a truly incomprehensible amount of information on the contemporary web, and it’s difficult to not feel that the ecosystem is bloated. Even if the evidence of the Dead Internet theory⁴, which suggests that the majority of the contemporary web is made of bots and generated content, is shaky, the widespread popularity of this idea says something about how people feel about the Internet. The web is currently so centralized and unable to evaporate, exploring it can feel like trudging through goo. This oversaturated landscape is in desperate need of the decayers of the web to recycle it into something new.

I choose to understand the decay, cleaning, evaporation of digital information as a neutral force that has the capacity for both negative and positive outcomes. It can cause important or interesting information to be lost, but it can also serve as a healthy cycle for web content to go through. The web is a more fragile space than we often consider it, and the technological realities of the internet combined with human behavior mean that what lasts of digital information can sometimes be unpredictable. We must remember that everything uploaded to the internet will be accessible forever, and understand that this is not always a negative reality.