The Disappearing Internet-Danny Moss

The disappearing Internet

Danny Moss

John Horgan

The internet is a treasure trove of information. It may be misinformation, but it is my childhood nonetheless. When I was a kid, I was a huge news junkie. I still am to this day. It’s not a matter of who is right and who is wrong to me, it’s my constant belief that knowledge is power, and knowing what is happening both near and far is the responsibility of a voting American citizen. During the 2016 Election, Donald Trump announced that he was going to have a rally in Lawrenceville, within a day-trip driving distance from where we lived. Presidential rallies don’t usually happen in New Jersey, so this was special. It was $200 per person, so attending was out of the question, but protests were happening outside that were free. After driving there, I went around and started interviewing people about their political beliefs. However, the most wholesome part of this experience was two people. One of them held a “Make America Great Again” poster, while the other held something along the lines of an “I hate Trump” poster. And they were getting along well. I remembered the Pro-Trumper saying, “Don’t believe what the internet tells you, we can still get along despite our differences.” Sadly, this was the end of diplomacy. After Trump’s speech ended (that I watched on my iPhone 5c, if I remember correctly), Trump supporters approached. For context, the rally was at a gated military base. I don’t know if it was because the protestors positioned themselves by the exit or if the supporters purposely wanted to counter-protest. There was some light arguing, until I remember one of the Trump supporters shouting, “TRUMP’S GONNA GIVE YOU A JOB, NOW SHUT UP.” After that, hell broke loose. There was shouting, throwing trash, and a lot of people running for cover. Luckily, the gate was blocking both sides, but damn… was it intense. I remember my mom shouting, “Get back, Danny! They’re gonna open the gates.” Of course, I didn’t listen; I was recording all this on my phone. Somehow, this drama finally ended, and all that was left was a bunch of posters that had fallen to the ground, litter everywhere, and a rally that was successful to both sides of the political spectrum. I stole some of the abandoned posters, ranging from “Trump is bad” to “Make America Great Again.” I used to have both of those posters in my room as trophies from the time I watched politics unfold in real time. I still remember my dad sending me a video of a local newspaper recording, where my 13-year-old self was smiling cheek-to-cheek with my phone out while the chaos unfolded. If only I knew just how this story would represent the decline of digital history

Alright, While it is a fun story, you may be asking “how does it relate to the title?” It’s because any mention of this protest has been scrubbed from the internet. Asbury Park Press simply stated that there were people protesting outside, without mentioning the outbreak that happened. C-Span only included a copy of Trump’s speech in New Jersey. No mention was made by ABC News either. If I could show you the video my dad sent me, I would, but I can’t find it either.

Now, do I think this is a political move by big news organizations to suppress the news? No. This is just one of the many examples that the history of the internet is disappearing from the world. When I was a kid, I remember watching an iCarly ad talking about how “anything posted on the internet stays there forever.” Isn’t it just ironic that I can’t find any recording of it now? We like to think that as technology improves, we preserve the old technology. But the sad truth that I am going to point out is that we are living in a world where history is being lost, and it can all be prevented if more attention was placed on archiving history.

Alright… so I guess it is time for me to pull out real sources of disappearing history other than just saying that I am old. Luckily, Pew Research Center published a research paper named “When Online Content Disappears.” The Independent wrote a paper discussing the findings. Around 40% of web pages that existed in 2013 have been lost by 2024. If a website was started in 2023, there is an 8% chance that it is also gone. If you go to a news page, you have a 23% chance that one of their weblinks is not functional. 21% of government websites have at least one broken link. Wikipedia, the most important repository of information, is estimated that more than half of its pages have information from sources lost to time. Now, let’s turn to X (formerly known as Twitter), the social media platform with absolutely no controversies (I hope you know that is sarcasm). 20% of all tweets disappear in just months. These are all hard numbers to suggest that the internet is failing to take steps to save critical information used by governments, organizations and other entities. As these sources disappear, we are just blindly expected to trust these without freedom to check ourselves. Before college, I wasn’t allowed to use wikipedia as a citation. However, I could use the sources wikipedia provides. Now that they are starting to go offline, what am I supposed to trust when writing papers… like this one!

Want to know another way our internet is disappearing before our very eyes? Look no further than Adobe Flash. Adobe Flash was a software development tool used for video games, animation, and website design during the early 2000s. At its peak, 28.5% of all websites used Adobe Flash. If you played any video games during the early 2000s and 2010s, chances are it used Flash. However, it had performance issues, lacked mobile support, and had security issues. Ultimately, newer website-building tools replaced Flash, and Adobe, seeing the maintenance cost, shut the service down in 2020. But the issue with this is that most computers could no longer use flash powered websites. For copyright reasons, you can’t even play these games anymore, as Adobe is no longer providing legal ways to run software made on their proprietary system. One of the biggest examples is a 9/11 interactive flash program that gave in depth on survivor’s stories about the attacks that have just been lost. Moreover, useful tools have also been lost. For example, the BBC used to have a website dedicated to teaching people foreign languages. Along with that was a wide variety of news in foreign languages to provide practice material for students.

However, this is not new. Losing media has always been a thing. Let’s get back to everyone’s favorite billionaire, ELON MUSK! At Least his company X (formally known… I am tired of typing this). So Musk’s company used to have a spin off app known as vine. It shut down in 2018, years before Musk bought “Twitter” (Now known as X, formally known as twitter). I could only describe this app as primitive Tik Tok, 6 second short-form content with high bingability. Like Adobe, “eX-Twitter” X saw the huge maintenance cost of the service, and realized it was no longer profitable. Now, to the company’s defense they managed the shutdown very professionally. People were given months to backup any content created, and a lot of it was indeed preserved. However, current ways to view this content are extremely unorganized. Most of the preserved content is in the form of compilations found on youtube. These compilations lack context, like the date each of these videos posted, its comment section, hashtags… ect. Moreover, less interesting content was not nearly as shared as the more popular videos for the time. That means comedy vines were saved, while more serious and political vines were lost. These political vines mentioned were especially towards general public reaction to world events. Nowadays, it can be extremely difficult. However, considering now that they are scattered throughout the internet, it is much harder to find previous news and events. Ironically enough, future historians might look upon history not through the events that unfolded, but through the jokes that were told. As I write this essay, I returned to 8 year old videos. The current youtube preserved vine videos saved were mostly comedic. While they are funny and amazing, I have to ask the question… Will historians have to piece the past together through the jokes that were told?

Another way history is forgotten is through operating system updates. Long story short, older mobile apps are unusable as the phones get newer software updates. There are countless reasons why this happens, so if you gave me 4 years and a chalkboard I could explain it. However, just know that with time, your favorite apps stop working if they do not keep up with your phone’s internal systems. In 2017, Apple updated their phone systems to work only on 64 bit systems. In other words, if your app was not receiving updates, it wouldn’t work anymore. So what did that mean? 180,000 smartphone apps were no longer usable at that time. Many of those apps were news organizations. For example, Circa. Circa was an app focus on giving important news and condensing it into easy to understand language. Due to a lack of finances, they went bankrupt. From there the app received no updates, and as the app entered 2017 was no longer usable. Another example is Flud News. Its whole premise is a news centered social media. On August 8th, 2013 it shut down due to a lack of funding. It never received 64-bit support and to this day is no longer downloadable on newer cell phones.

You may be saying, “So what few news and historic events get lost to time! I don’t care and most people don’t care about old nonsense.” Well first off I am going to tell you… later! But I also wanted to take this moment to talk about why losing history is not just bad for society in general, but also… losing the things you paid real money for! And that… gets me to video games… Wait!!! Let me explain!!!! Gamer or not, I am sure you have heard of… Fortnite!? It only has 650 million registered players, and it only makes a sad and pathetic 4.5 billion dollars in annual revenue for the small company Epic Games. In all seriousness, I personally have a lot of respect for Epic as a company. They are incredibly generous towards independent video game developers. But side tangent aside and reiterating again, a company that makes 4.5 billion dollars a year will attract competitors that want that kind of revenue stream. But here is the thing: Fortnite and many others like it are called “Always-Online” For anyone not a swag awesome gamer like myself, This means that the game needs to always be connected to an external server. This is because games like Fortnite are multiplayer only, and players need to be connected to one another. If the company goes bankrupt, or chooses to shut down the servers. Well… that game is gone… just gone. No way to play or enjoy it again. Now, it’s just a video game. Who cares? Well, that would be fine if there weren't things you could buy for real money in the game. Some items could cost upwards of hundreds of dollars in the game. When the servers go offline, everything you spent is gone with it. While your fortnite purchases should be safe for hopefully decades to come as the game is still financially flourishing, other companies that tried to copy this strategy did not do so well. Spellbreaker was a Fortnite-inspired game with a focus on magic. You could spend real money. However, now that it is shut down, there is no way to access anything that you bought. Others have followed in this path: The Culling, The Cycle: Frontier, Crayta, LawBreakers and Gigantic are all games that have been shut down with no real way to restore them. If you spent any money on them, goodluck trying to get a refund now. All these companies mentioned are… bankrupt. So preserving history is not just important for archival reasons, but also because the digital goods you spent money on are stripped away like a thief in the night. This also applies to any digital goods, if you buy them online and hold them online they can be removed at any time. Did you maybe buy a research paper online and they went bankrupt, your money is gone. If you look at any digital storefront, most of them have a clause saying “They can remove the digital product from your library for any reason.” BooksOnBoard was a digital storefront for books. However it shutdown in 2013, and any books you did not download in time were lost forever even if you paid for it. JManga, a comic book storefront shutdown meaning any books you purchased were also gone forever.

Video games are one of the biggest victims of history being lost, but that goes beyond the scope of this project. It would make this essay go from a few pages to several books long. But I will give you a snippet of one game that was lost to time… my very own game…

I made a game in 2023 named Servants of Ruin. Imagine chess but with much more complicated rules. At the time, I was really proud of how it turned out, and I learned a lot. However, the game struggled to maintain a steady player base, if any at all. I woke up one day before school only to realize Amazon had charged me $40 for having the game running on their platform. I don’t blame them; it was the exact amount they told me it would cost. But I couldn’t justify continuing the game, so I moved to another domain that offered free server management. It worked fine for a few months until I got an email saying the company hosting the servers went bankrupt. So for a few months straight, my game was also lost to history. In fact, writing this paper ultimately made me return to the project and release it publicly, so anyone could run a private server of the game to keep it running.

And that gets to my next point: why? Why is so much history being lost? Well, it’s quite obvious: it costs money. Making a server that stores information is not cheap. My game cost $10 a month to host, and it was $13 per year just to reserve the name servantsofruin.com. Preserving history is important, but it’s entirely selfless. YOU have to find the data, YOU have to pay for the server, YOU have to fight legal battles if organizations think you are distributing copyrighted materials without their consent. The Internet Archive, the biggest archival website in the world and owner of the wayback machine, had to spend 3 years and an undisclosed amount of legal fees over a legal battle for copyrighted work distributed on their website. In fact, the internet archive has an entire section purely dedicated to the lawsuits they have to overcome in the name of historic preservation.

But, some people don’t want preservation. And in all fairness, I understand the viewpoint. Imagine if an embarrassing photo or memory of you started circulating around the internet. For example, Nicole Crowther was an actress in Glee. She accidentally spoiled the show in a deleted tweet. The producer of the show scolded her about it, and to this day, she hasn’t worked in show business. The sad thing is that this is the best-case scenario. I won’t even get into the several cases of suicide caused by images resurfacing of people.

So then, what is the point of preserving history if it only seeks to harm the present? That is a very good question (If I do say so myself). In the world of Artificial Intelligence, we must train it on good information. As history goes away and websites become unavailable, the only content remaining is misinformed, unsourced, and untrustworthy data. I am terrified about a future where AI just comes out of nowhere and says, “THIS IS THE RIGHT ANSWER,” without providing any sources or resources to look at to confirm the validity of the language model. I certainly don’t want AI's information about science stemming from social media posts from so-called “experts.” A lack of sources will make it much easier to malicious groups to spread misinformation as broken links will just been overlooked as “outdated” rather than just “completely random bulls-(I just realized this is a school project and I can’t swear).” Another great detail about spreading information, is that the credits of this information is also excluded. If I made a research paper, and people only quoted the publisher, there would be no way I could prove I was the original author if the publisher shut down. It would make people’s hard work become forgotten as no one can remember the actual person that went through all the effort to find the truth. Moreover, I am a staunch believer that “If you want to know the future, look at the past.” Ironically enough, it is believed that Albert Einstein said this. But we have no direct proof, which says a lot about the importance of preserving evidence of the past, so we can understand our previous mistakes as human beings and move in a better direction. If we don’t learn from our past mistakes, we are bound to repeat them.

The internet is an amazing place, filled with vast amounts of information. Of course, some of it is disinformation, but we take the good with the bad. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t reduce the negative impact. As time goes on, information is inevitably lost, but it doesn't have to stay that way. With the right channels and systems in place, we can preserve and showcase the history of the internet for everyone to explore. From old video games, apps, scientific resources, websites, news, tools and even animations lost due to outdated technology, there's an entire world of internet history that's been forgotten. But that doesn’t mean it can never be rediscovered! By learning from our past mistakes, we can build a better future, where once-lost knowledge is returned to the people!

Sources:

Myself for the intro story

Some of the most iconic 9/11 news coverage is lost. Blame Adobe Flash | CNN Business

PoliticsNow in 1996 - Web Design Museum

Exploring The Rise and Fall of Vine, the original TikTok

JManga shuts down, taking all the manga you bought with it

Why 180,000 iPhone Apps Aren't Compatible With iOS 11 - Business Insider

Digital eBook Website Books on Board Is Closing - Good e-Reader

What Happened to Circa, the App Aiming to Fix Journalism?

Flud folds: News reader startup is shutting down | VentureBeat

lawsuit | Internet Archive Blogs

Albert Einstein Quote: “If you want to know the future, look at the past.”