The Internet is a Place

The internet used to be a capital-P Place that you could go to. You used to be either Currently Online or Not Currently Online, with a couple liminal options (BRB, AFK). To access the Place, you had to decide to sit down at a computer and connect to it intentionally. It sounded like this.

Now, the internet is an omnipresent god; it's All Space. Beyond the portability of the personal computer (laptops, tablets, smart phones), which makes connectivity immediately--and interminably--accessible, the internet hosts and grants access to nearly every aspect of our lives: our medical infrastructure, our bills, where and how we perform our jobs, our security systems both large and small, and so on. It allows us to remotely adjust our washing machine cycle, lets our refrigerators communicate with our virtual home assistants, and holds our restaurant menus behind QR codes.

The shift of the internet from a Place to All Space is neither all good nor all bad. But it certainly is, and this change in how we interact with the internet has subsequently changed how we maintain it. If the internet is no longer a library (a Place) of human knowledge and activity, but rather the engine by which we live (All Space), the intuitive care of it shifts from a model of preservation to one of maintenance. There's little incentive to archive what has been, and an urgent drive to ensure that basic, immediate functionality is maintained.

Despite early and ongoing insistence to the contrary, things that end up online are not forever. A study by the Pew Research Center found that one quarter of all webpages that existed between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible. 23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, as do 21% of webpages from government sites. Local-level government webpages are especially likely to have broken links. 54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their sources section that directs to a page that no longer exists.

What do we do?

We archive the internet! Two major projects already doing this important work are linked in the sidebar. Contributing to either (or both!) is a huge help. Individual sites like mine--and the hundreds of others made by creative nostalgics on Neocities--are attempts to recreate and display the individuality and whimsy of the internet when it was a Place.

I coded this site using HTML and CSS. To create and maintain the integrity of the project, I have:

• ⊳ Edited the code to disallow search engines and AI bots from crawling the site, meaning programs like ChatGPT can't feed themselves my content.
• ⊳ Stored a backup of my site locally; if my site host (Neocities) goes under, my site can still exist.
• ⊳ Chosen a page layout that is not responsive, i.e. not mobile-friendly. My site is meant to be viewed on a desktop computer.