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Watched a short youtube video by Hank Green titled the web is going to die. He talked about ghost towns and connected that to how the internet as we know it is slowly but already becoming a ghost town. Go watch the video yourself cause I'm not the best explainer (URL: video), but he connected it to the everchanging world of the internet and that though ghost towns in the world remain as graveyards of the memories and lives of those who once lived there forever stuck in time, the internet as we know it is rapidly degrading and fading away with every 404 page, empty servers, dead websites and silent group chats. It's made me come to the realization that archiving of the web isn't widely mentioned or talked about and when these domains go silent there's no way of going back to see what was there because it will have already been deleted. It made me really value the fact I was lucky enough to have been born the earliest I could've been born to have been able to experience the internet before it got bought out. Now I get to watch it die before my very eyes.
Hopefully I don't ramble for too long, but seeing more and more posts and people talking talking about how this year marks the end of the internet we once knew it to be. It feels that way the more I look at it. I haven't been an avid hard internet user for quite some time, but I've noticed the past years or so how the internet has been decaying from the inside as more and more people become disinterested in it and try to escape from it yet it gets shoved down our throats everyday by these big corporations. Feels like we're at this point in our relationship with the web that we want nothing to do with it anymore and want every way to get away from it, but with a world that has fully incorporated technology into everything it feels pointless to try and escape.
I feel somber that at some point the internet that I grew up with will just be a graveyard I visit every once and a while soon. It kind of already is a graveyard in the process of burring those who've perished as more and more websites get their connection pulled and render unable to load, pieces of media scrubbed from the web never to be found again. I constantly rewatch and revisit so many dead websites or old you tube channels that are inactive hoping it doesn't take them. Still remember when that video said 3 months ago instead of 13 years ago.
All these feelings have given me such a deep appreciation for the early 2010s internet. Roughly 2009-2014 internet. Just before it got bought out in the mid 2010s. The internet was still something not everyone was on, but there was a bustling small community on there of people who drowned themselves in it. The content that was made during that time outshines anything made today. It was because people had passion and were driven by that passion to create. There was no monetization or realization of it yet. People made shit just for the sake of it. There was no pressure to make something groundbreaking or crazy. People posted casually and authentically. Now not to say that era wasn't all sunshine and rainbows, I had my fair share of weird media that I probably shouldn't have seen and drama I shouldn't have partaken in. There was a lot of fucked up shit that happened, but it does not outweigh the shit being posted today. Everyone today is a bitch online and actively looking to start drama for no reason but to feel something. I hate it.
Pockets on the internet like Spacehey are the only places I wish to stay in as long as they are still around. It's good to know many in my generation yearn for a better web experience and are doing things to change it.
But I can't beg to wonder when the final nail to decades worth of media, websites and the digital landscape as a whole will be shutdown for good.
Its same feeling everyone has at the moment the "when will IT happen?" no one knows.
When will it finally die? how soon? or has it already died? Like we died in 2020? in 2016? in 2012?
I don't even know anymore.
To not leave on a bad note, the internet can be saved if we all work to save it and give it back to the people. Change is possible!
TTYL
S.S
When will the digital landscape we all grew to love and grew up with die? Is this the old internets final breath?
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xxRebellious_Emmaxx
The modern internet sucks so fucking badly that at this point, I sometimes wish a solar flare would hurry up and strike the Earth already before I remember that this would also wreak havoc on electronic devices that don't even require a connection to the internet to work (such as MP3 players, CD/DVD players, and televisions, for instance).
Hell, even archival websites aren't safe from the tyranny of governments who care more about corporate profits than public consumer goods thanks to stupid copyright laws that enable bigmegacorps to abuse their powers and demand content be removed or else, as seen last year with the Internet Archive being temporarily shut down for reasons relating to this.
Nothing on the internet is truly safe anymore (and perhaps arguably never has been, if we're being honest with ourselves here), and this perhaps is another good reason to create your own locally stored archives of things on the web that you enjoy onto things like USB flash drives, CDs, DVDs, SSD cards, etc. People right now might think you're crazy for doing this and look at you like you suddenly grew another head, but they'll see just who's laughing when they see the grand vanishing of content from the internet for themselves in real time, whether that's today, tomorrow, next week, next year, etc, but eventually, it will happen sooner or later with the way things are going with the world wide web that we've all come to know since the 1990s.
Rocco
The internet is just a whole bunch of connected servers. If a bunch of tech savvy people start archiving sites and programs OFFline, you can form a parallel net that would/could survive.