digital apocalypse
We're About To Enter The Digital Dark Ages
From Gawker to the Cartoon Network, online archives are vanishing — and they're taking our cultural history with them.
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The Lede
Google used to have an online service that generated pithy, user-friendly versions of long, commercially unwieldy uniform resource locators — the key addresses that identify everything on the web. Google announced that as of next year, all of the existing shortened URLs are getting turned off. Poof. And on the web, if your URL doesn't work, you might as well not exist. Now, rendering a bunch of web content invisible isn't the end of days. Not by itself. The problem is, this kind of thing keeps happening.
Key Details
- The Pew Research Center estimates that a quarter of everything put on the web from 2013 to 2023 is inaccessible — meaning almost 40% of the web as it existed in 2013 is simply not there today.
- The Cartoon Network archive, Yahoo Answers, chunks of the Imgur photo service, and the spicy parts of Tumblr are gone.
- "If a library burns down, it's a tragedy, but most of the books survive elsewhere," says Mark Graham, an internet archivist. "But the digital world is inherently fragile and potentially ephemeral."
