PIEN HUANG, HOST:
You've probably heard that the internet is forever, but is it really? You've probably also lost access to some of the things that you've loved on the internet - a blog that went dark, an account you're locked out of or some funny video that's just vanished. Writer S.E. Smith calls for giving more thought into what gets kept and lost on the internet and wrote about it for the tech news site The Verge. Welcome, S.E.
S E SMITH: Thank you so much for having me.
HUANG: So we think of the internet as forever, like a place where old posts and photos can come back and haunt us. Is that no longer true?
SMITH: It is definitely no longer true. There's a concept known as digital decay, which refers to online media just kind of disappearing for a variety of reasons. Pew recently did a study showing that about 40% of websites since about 2013 have just vanished. They are inaccessible. There's a maze of dead links that go nowhere. So there's an idea that, oh, if I put it out there, it will be online forever. I can always find it again. An employer can always find it. And that's just really not the case, especially now that we're in this kind of app-based world where you don't control your content.
HUANG: Yeah, I mean, I guess in a really basic sense, like, what happened? Like, where has all the content gone?
SMITH: Some of this is happening because organizations go out of business, so you have servers going offline. You have people deciding to remove their own content. You have organizations taking down old content or putting up a paywall. You have, as we're seeing with the federal government right now, a lot of, quote-unquote, "archiving" of material that is pulled offline. So you go to look something up at, say, the NIH and what you get is a 404. In terms of what levels is gone, some of that information really is gone.
HUANG: I mean, I feel like in the early years of the internet, like, preserving every scrap was some kind of a goal, you know, someone's goal. I mean, the Library of Congress archived, like, every tweet until the late 2010s. I'm wondering, like, from your perspective, like, when did that goal change and why?
SMITH: Well, there definitely are some initiatives that are trying to archive content. Obviously, there's the Internet Archive.
HUANG: Use that a lot.
SMITH: Yes, the Internet Archive is a favorite of many of us, I think, which again, if those servers ever go down, if they lose a lawsuit, if something catastrophic happens, what happens to all of that archived material? I think people might rely on that a little bit too much. But I do think that there's just so much content, and even with data storage getting much cheaper and more efficient, it's just impossible to keep up.
HUANG: We do have this history of losing or discarding or, you know, specifically curating what types of physical records, you know, remained long before the internet. So do we think that digital decay is all that different?
SMITH: I think it's a little bit different because with that kind of loss of data, we are also seeing a replacement with AI garbage, which is part of what makes this moment so upsetting as a journalist and as a member of society to see. Not only is our work disappearing, but it's being replaced by these large language models, which are professionally and personally, I think, not equivalent to real human beings. So we're seeing tech companies harvesting our work, harvesting our writing, harvesting our art, and then turning it into garbage that is slowly replacing it.
HUANG: But, fundamentally, do you feel like it is important for the internet to last forever - at least parts of the internet to last forever? Like, do we really need every scrap of TikTok and, you know, X and, you know, people's passing thoughts and fleeting thoughts to really last?
SMITH: I am definitely OK with future generations not knowing that I ate a roast beef sandwich on February 18, 2017, right?
HUANG: (Laughter).
SMITH: But I do think we need to have a conversation about the fact that all data ultimately is ephemeral. Obviously, every single piece of data is not going to last forever. That would be just a wildly overwhelming amount of information. But we do need to decide what information is important to us and how we want to preserve it and how we make sure that evidence of these conversations that we had and these shifts in society is told from multiple points of view.
HUANG: That's journalist S.E. Smith. S.E., thanks so much for joining us.
SMITH: Of course, it was a pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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