It goes without saying the extraordinary gift of having near limitless raw information has it's own special drawbacks. Yes, I could go on about the rampant misinformation that plagues social media and major news outlets, and maybe split off into a tangent just how damaging the negatives about near-instantaneous messaging and constant barrage of Bad Things That Are Happening are for us as a species. But rather than wasting time decrying these things, I'd like to instead bring awareness to a certain aspect of digital infrastructure as we know it.

To put it frankly, given Current Events and the enshittifaction of the internet as we know it, the risk of a digital dark age grows by the day. It could be a loss of information the likes of which we haven't seen since the burning of the Library of Alexandria. All throughout human history have our works and words been lost to time, but with so much of it having been centralized in one place, we stand to lose quite a lot of it in one fell swoop.

It's happened quite a few times now throughout the history of the interwebs: places like Geocities and Angelfire were shut down and personal sites archived to the Wayback Machine remain even accessible, The Great Strikethrough of 2007, the FanFiction-dot-Net purge of 2012, the Tumblr Apocalypse of 2018. Countless creative works and websites and personal stories, erased from the net in a flash. And now, with institutes such as Internet Archive under assault, I feel it falls to us to preserve this information for the future.

In my own experience, I started out with hoarding music from my childhood. My old man taught me how to rip songs off of fragile CD's and convert into mp3 formatting, how to pirate files off the internet, and how to transfer them from PC to personal laptop and back again. But it wasn't until the countdown for porn to be wiped off of Tumblr began that I extended these efforts of preservation towards fanart and fanfic. As of right now, I have nearly 100GB worth of fanart saved from the end of 2018 to now, and lots of AO3 fics saved as pdfs. Come the 2020 pandemic, I expanded those efforts to longplays of video games I never got around to for the sake of having background noise while I crochet, personal favorite GDQ runs, Let's Plays, long-form video essays, indie shows, music videos, tutorials and how to's of a wide variety of subjects, etc. I've put money towards external hard drives and do a yearly backup of all the digitized items I squirreled away during that timeframe.

Of course, this is all digital information I find important to me personally. It's a sort of roadmap of all the fandoms I've either briefly dipped my toes into or outright dedicated years to creative. But with this, I hope to inspire others to take similar actions. It takes only a few seconds to right-click an image you like and save it to a dedicated folder for later viewing, AO3 has a convient download button for all your favorite transformative works. Those are good starting points, and I encourage you, the reader of this, to perhaps consider taking it to the next level: learn how to download youtube videos and convert them into mp3s, how to torrent media (and the etiquete associated with the act), perserve discord conversations (all it takes is one instance of drama to wipe all those interactions off the face of the earth!) and creative brainstorming for later reference, or even emulate your favorite Pokemon game right off of Internet Archive.

They say everything on the internet is forever, but I'd say that is a bit of a misnomer. Anything could be wiped out from the public eye by a simple misclick or malicious, profit-driven intent, but those same events that have taken place on the web are forever burned into the memories of those who witnessed it. If you don't want to lose that important information, I highly recommend getting into the habit of backing it up. That niche fanart you love could be purged by its artist days after you discovered it, a streaming service could pull the plug on a show you're enjoying without offering a single alternative to watching it again. Preservation of the web is more imperative than ever, and it's up to you, dear reader, to ensure you don't lose access to the digital things you can about.

And remember! If buying is no longer owning, then piracy is not stealing :D