Internet Manifesto (WIP)

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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 FFN.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.

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