One of my favorite quotes is, 

“The past is history written in stone that can't be altered” ~Sherrilyn Kenyon

It goes on beyond that line about the transitory nature of the future and the malleability of the present, but I care little for those parts. That line is part of what makes me obsessed with statues and carvings, that is in part what inspired my previous post about the change of statues and art over the centuries. 

Growing up alongside the internet, many of us have heard the mantra that “Everything you post on the internet is permanent”. In many ways this has rung true throughout the years, proven through cancel culture's digging through the history of influencers and politicians. Still many of us act on it without care, because as we've grown we've also realized, the internet is a vast ocean of voices, faces, and opinions. Unless one displays something of note, positive or negative, it tends to fade into the background. 

Another quote I quite enjoy is,

“They say the past is etched in stone, but it isn’t. It’s smoke trapped in a closed room, swirling… changing. Buffeted by the passing of years and wishful thinking. But even though our perception of it changes, one thing remains constant. The past can never be completely erased. It lingers. Like the scent of burning wood.” ~James Wesley - Daredevil

When one considers the butterfly effect in terms of changing the past to affect the future, a butterfly's wings leading to a tornado being the common example, it's hard to believe. The slight gust of wind from a butterfly's wings might get swallowed up by the swirling wind of some other event. Similarly one picture, post, or quote from someone on the internet might get swallowed up by the tides of fads and trends never to be noticed or to have a true effect. There only if you search deeply enough. 

The internet is in many ways the new Library of Alexandria, and it's burning at the same time. We have repositories of much of the world's history, literature, and media in the palm of our hands. You can search and find an answer for nearly anything. The lives and memories of the people of our century have never been so well documented. And it's all being slowly lost. With the updating of social media platforms, the movement of databases, the changing of monolithic structures in the internet day in and day out, data is lost, memories are wiped, and that one joke you made 8 years ago and were about to look for, gone. 

It's actually worse than that though. Much of the newest media in the world, is only kept online. Games, movies, books. Especially when there are complicated legal arrangements around the media, it can be cut from access, often times only available if it's been pirated. Games from the early days as well as games that are just 5-10 years old are now delisted and unable to be found anywhere legally. The Culling, The Legend of Zelda Four Swords Anniversary Edition, The Royal Game of Ur. You can find hundreds more games similarly unavailable at delistedgames.com. Piracy and emulation have helped to some degree, but more often games and movies that people have bought and love, are being taken off line. Live service or multiplayer games are especially suspect to going extinct if their player population dwindles. 

But it's still worse than that. As AI generated content is growing more and more in popularity, the dark forest of the internet is growing darker. Chat GPT and it's users are currently generating more text than has ever appeared in every physical book ever written every two weeks. There are bots setup to write articles and post them online, written specifically to garner views from people. As time passes this is likely to only get worse. A deepening of the dark forest.

The internet has already been an ocean of content, much lost to the change of it's infrastructure, others lost to anonymity by being drowned out, even more lost to legal disputes and the loss of licensing. All of this overshadowed by the wave of AI generated content. There are ways to counteract this though. The waybackmachine, the internet archive(https://archive.org/), the continued piracy and storing of older content inaccessible otherwise, the preservation of media as it's taken off the market in various archives. For AI we're going to have to find ways to verify human material. Although annoying, captchas are still a commonly used and difficult to bypass means of verifying humanity. Similar such systems will likely have to be implemented for all types of social media, news outlets, and other such sources of online content.

All I can say is, regardless of whatever the past is written in, it is up to us to search through the dark and write it all the same. The library is burning but we can save much of it. We just have to put in the effort to preserve it.