Inspired by the post about the hieroglyphs the one dude hoped would last forever.
People always talk about future historians being confused at memes and old forums, but surely a lot of catastrophic events could just wipe out the internet wholesale, right? If something REALLY COOL 
like a giant meteor wiped out everybody, what if aliens came along and were deeply confused that our culture seems to end randomly in the mid 2010s, subsumed by an internet whose only remaining shreds are references in big scientific studies?
The history textbooks on our dumb asses would surely read “and the humans all talked into screens and used “hyper links” to share information and opinions. Very little is known about this obscure human ritual as no evidence can be found of its existence beyond scattered references in ancient texts contemporary to its existence.”
Thinkin bout the impermanence of the internet rn
“They seemed to have developed a communication system which probably connected all the settlements of the planet. Almost all data storage technology was obliterated by a solar event millions of years ago, but archaeologists have discovered scattered hardware media surviving in subsurface dwellings. While most data is beyond recovery, the dozens of known data samples conforming to recognizable formats identified are all, invariably, pictures of quadrupedal mammals or up close images of genitalia. The meaning of this finding is under intense debate.”
a pervasive legend of the late anthropocene era seems to involve a man who, by pure reason and scientific methodology, was able to transmogrify himself into a preserved food item called a “pickle.” Our records indicate that this was the height of comedy during this time period as multiple distinct sources reference it as being the “funniest shit [they’d] ever seen”
It appears that a complaint about a copper salesman is still an ongoing issue
It’s much worse than this. Digital media is not durable in any archivally/archaeologically relevant sense of the word. Magnetic tape in a bunker, maybe, but that’ll leave exoarchaeologists with mainly data about finance. Spinning rust in a data center (where most of “the internet” is) has an operational lifespan measured in single-digit years, and SSDs not substantially better. Any actual data that survives a disaster will almost certainly be unreadable without an electron microscope since all the related tech will be long gone.
Anything digital has the hard-copy shelf life of a can of tuna and our paper is acidic pulp that crumbles to dust in a few decades. How many primary documents are we carving into stone or stamping in ceramic these days?
We’ll be like the carthaginians or the etruscans and will leave barely anything legible behind
and our paper is acidic pulp that crumbles to dust in a few decades
has paper gotten significantly worse or something? books are one of the few things that seem to have a lifespan well beyond what capitalists and consumers would consider their utility
It really depends on the paper. Like you can get “archival” paper that has low lignen levels and won’t yellow and deteriorate as fast. At the other end you have like newsprint and cheap paperbacks (the pulp in pulp fiction refers to the low quality of the paper in the books) and they really don’t last. In general though, I think most of the old texts we have as books are written on parchment, which is leather. I do think there are ways to preserve paper, but it probably involves periodic maintenance and replacement and specific conditions.
Yeah only the modern paper that advertises itself as archival can last as long as a normal sheet of paper could a few hundred years ago. Also the parchment thing. And papyrus.
That’s assuming the NSA isn’t converting snapshots of the entire internet to tape and storing it in underground bunkers
i don’t think we could produce enough tape for even a fraction of a snapshot. on top of that, there’s too much data to even start sorting through what’s worth saving and what’s just junk
it makes sense to me that they just store absolutely everything always with the idea that at some point they’ll be able to go back and efficiently sort through and decrypt it all
Our culture is now fully ephemeral…
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God, two years ago I had an idea for a story about archaeologists in 2222 (after a huge geomagnetic storm / solar flare / whatever you call it circa 2100, among other things) trying to learn about trans culture in the 2020s by essentially diving into flooded coastal cities and trying to find old hard drives or SSDs and trying to recover the data despite the damage done to them. This just reminded me of that. It sounds like a really interesting premise but I also don’t think I have the skills to write it myself.
Alas thou must, this sounds like it fucks. Reminds me of the mac archive of a 90s trans website from a while ago.
I haven’t heard of that, please tell me about it.
Also, to be clear, that story idea was meant to be the fifth and final story in a series of short stories about trans shit in the near-ish future, of which I only wrote the first one-and-a-half stories. The first four stories were all going to be parodies of different things — Papers Please, Half-Life 2, Kin-dza-dza!, and Gurren Lagann, with individual scenes or details inspired by other things — and they would together show the gradual transformation of a fictional US state as it gets progressively more transphobic, eugenicist, and fascistic over the course of the 21st century. While each story was going to be very comedic and biting in its satire, and each story would end with some sort of victory over the oppressors… Well, the fact that things kept getting increasingly horrible just made me feel like the fifth and final story being a sort of epilogue would be a nice conclusion, even if said epilogue didn’t actually have much of anything apparent to do with the other four stories.
Also I cannot express how much I would read that. It sounds fuckin awesome <3
Rest assured, each blockchain node contains an entire copy of the blockchain. Your NFTs are safe.
All my apes, safe and secure.
Printing the blockchain on stone tablets so that archeologists can know about my apes
All my apes, stone.
When I find a recipe that works I just write it down in a spiral cookbook my wife got in a buy nothing group.
Searching for recipes is such a hellscape, and it’s bound to get worse with AI telling us to put fucking glue in everything.
Something I’ve learned about the internet is that curation is actually really valuable.
Having someone whose taste you generally agree with, whose job it is to go “hey this actually sucks” or “hey this is actually good” is infinitely better than just digging through the miles of garbage that people dump out online, and that’s even from before the dead internet really kicked off.
Like if you want recipes, you’ll have an infinitely better time going to your local library and checking out an actual cookbook than you will desperately scraping through blogs.
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I’m ok with that. I got the only good thing I needed out of the internet: my girlfriend. Everything else I can live without.
SAME
god what a mood.
The content of the internet would not exist but the remains of its infrastructure would survive so presumably alien anthropologists would be able to infer a lot from that
Also lots of academic books printed on paper about the internet and society in pretty much every university library on Earth.
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“The internet was an interconnected system of cats in tubes…”
Ill start doing my part and printing out all my favorite memes so the aliens know what made me chuckle.
most modern paper barely lasts longer than digital data
woosh
suck my dick
Very cool response. Totally normal.
Somebody posted this article here a couple years ago with the thesis that the internet will not survive, and that was before LM saturation.
There’s a phrase that’s been living inside my head lately, a brain parasite, some burrowing larva covered in thorns and barbs of words.
Nice to see RFK Jr on Substack!!!
Nihilism is so eyerolling and juvenile Idk. Like
Meet The Edgy Influencers Making Holocaust Denial Hip Again. Are we in trouble? Maybe, but even trouble is ending.
Oh yeah must be nice being a cishet neurotypical white guy in suburban america, fucking idiot. Nobody else has the safety to do nihilism, really. Of course you have the privilege not to give a fuck about fascism.
It even seems to be killing off sex, replacing it with more cheap, synthetic ersatz. Our most basic biological drives simply wither in its cold blue light.
Oh no, not this guy again! Shinzo Abe motherfucker!!!All those pouty nineteen-year-old lowercase nymphets, so fluent in their borrowed boredom, flatly reciting don’t just choke me i want someone to cut off my entire head.
Idk man sounds kinda based? Don’t kinkshame bro.
And it’s true that the internet has changed some things: mostly, it’s helped break apart the cohesive working-class communities that produce a strong left, and turned them into vague swarms of monads.
Yeah, guy?
This article sucks soz, dude is pure cringe. He’s not even entirely wrong about the death of stuff on the internet, the thrust of the article isn’t bad just a techbro ass…
It’s Uber for dogs! It’s Uber for dogshit! It’s picking up a fresh, creamy pile of dogshit with your bare hands—on your phone!
However this kinda fucks lmao.
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Prolly one of those slightly inexplicable communists who wants socialism but has personal values to the right of the soviet russian government
Eh, I guess I’ll defend him a bit because I do read him pretty often.
He’s definitely got a Marxist kernel in his writings. If you go back and look at his older stuff it’s pretty on-brand ML internet blogging. That being said, he’s by no means a “good communist” in any sense, but i don’t think he’s trying to be. I think a few years ago he made a shift towards a literary approach, where the arguments he explicitly makes in an essay may not necessarily be what the actual intention of the piece is, and he will often turn what you think is a cut-and-dry op-ed about some recent event into a totally hallucinatory retelling from some events from the middle ages. The point he’s making is often entirely unclear, and honestly i kinda vibe with that sometimes.
Here, though, i think he’s making some pretty clear arguments (though the whole “the internet is literally going to end” may not actually be one of them). A big part of what he’s saying about the internet is that what you find on it just doesn’t fucking mean anything. His bit about the Holocaust isn’t about an actual existing increase of Holocaust denial, which may be occurring, but rather about bullshit articles that claim that there is without any actual basis in reality. It’s just people making shit up for clicks. This isn’t new, it’s always been a part of the internet, but it’s reaching a point where the signal-to-noise ratio is converging on zero, where everything is all meaningless slop which is making our lives worse.
The internet has enabled us to live, for the first time, entirely apart from other people. It replaces everything good in life with a low-resolution simulation. A handful of sugar instead of a meal: addictive but empty, just enough to keep you alive. It even seems to be killing off sex, replacing it with more cheap, synthetic ersatz. Our most basic biological drives simply wither in its cold blue light. People will cheerfully admit that the internet has destroyed their attention spans, but what it’s really done away with is your ability to think. Usually, when I’m doing something boring but necessary—the washing up, or walking to the post office—I’ll constantly interrupt myself; there’s a little Joycean warbling from the back of my brain. ‘Boredom is the dream bird that broods the egg of experience.’ But when I’m listlessly killing time on the internet, there is nothing. The mind does not wander. I am not there. That rectangular hole spews out war crimes and cutesy comedies and affirmations and porn, all of it mixed together into one general-purpose informational goo, and I remain in its trance, the lifeless scroll, twitching against the screen until the sky goes dark and I’m one day closer to the end. You lose hours to—what? An endless slideshow of barely interesting images and actively unpleasant text. Oh, cool—more memes! You know it’s all very boring, brooding nothing, but the internet addicts you to your own boredom. I’ve tried heroin: this is worse. More numb, more blank, more nowhere. A portable suicide booth; a device for turning off your entire existence. Death is no longer waiting for you at the far end of life. It eats away at your short span from the inside out.
Say he’s wrong.
This article sucks soz, dude is pure cringe. He’s not even entirely wrong about the death of stuff on the internet, the thrust of the article isn’t bad just a techbro ass…
I’m not holding his feet to some NOT A GOOD COMMUNIST fire, and I don’t even disagree with the “pretty clear arguments” he makes, his social politics are fuckin unbearable though. “Holocaust denial people? Eh, everything ends” is borderline verbatim what he says, whatever you might read into it. His goofy scaremongering about women posting kink stuff or people NOT HAVING SEX CUZ COMPUTER (classic bullshit comments have been removed from hexbear for) among other things, tells me what I know about this guy. All stuff I said in my direct reply to you.
I read the article.
This is an argument against nihilism that’s emerged online. It’s not “Holocaust denial people? eh, everything ends,” it’s “the internet trivializes genocide denial by treating it as a silly social trend instead of a real existing tendency, effectively reducing it to noise that nobody will pay attention to.”
His goofy scaremongering about women posting kink stuff
I don’t see the bit about the lowercase nymphets as scaremongering. It’s about this drive for increasingly provocative content that is trying harder and harder to capture our attention and, somehow, our money. Wild and crazy kinks? Cool. Wild and crazy kinks created entirely to capture attention online, backed by the capitalist profit incentive? Kinda cringe.
or people NOT HAVING SEX CUZ COMPUTER (classic bullshit comments have been removed from hexbear for) among other things, tells me what I know about this guy.
Why’s this bullshit? Has there not been a loss of intimacy since phones and the internet? Cause I gotta say, I’m a pretty lonely mf’er right now and, being totally transparent out here, this would have been a much harder situation to get myself in without internet porn and reddit/YouTube bullshit. And even sample size of one and all, are you going to totally deny a causal relationship between the rise of the internet and the apparent loneliness everywhere?
That being said, he’s British, and well uhh… oof.
It even seems to be killing off sex, replacing it with more cheap, synthetic ersatz. Our most basic biological drives simply wither in its cold blue light.
Also lmao, as I said above what is it with people upholding Shinzo Abe thought?
How does Shinzo Abe relate?
This seems like a prime comment to illustrate that we’re not in the midst of an organized revolution and life is much different offline
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I know some online and offline leftists and there is a very clear difference between the types
turned them into vague swarms of monads.
I bet you $100 this dude has never read Leibniz
It’s interesting how an alien civilization finding hard drives and stuff after our extinction would probably have a really hard time reverse engineering the way we store information and what that information even is. It even comes down to what their mathematics looks like. The binary system alone, and number bases in general, already require quite a lot of maths if you reduce them to their primitive functions. Going as far as to assume they have the same maths as us and have figured out binary system data representation, they still need to reverse engineer a crapton of computer science theory, with help from any physical books that can be found.
Yeah that too, they’d need at least one working x86 computer and a linux or windows install disc at minimum. Our tech would probably be useless to them!
A cool project would be a massive stone codex that teaches the reader how to read magnetic tapes
Probably, seconding the architecture of the internet or people with computers somehow still functional having small offline copies of pages. For a more positive spin on this eventually the internet will be replaced by something different through time, ideally better with its own set of problems, so in that sense the internet as we know of it will be a footnote for future generations over long enough time.
Idk if offline copies of pages would help their understanding much, lol. Just weird little pages that would probably look like digital newspapers…
I look forwaed to the net being replaced!!
That’s what the internet is in a way isn’t it? I was thinking more of the lines of kiwix for example, or something crawled through with one of those html grabbers, they’d get the gist is they can click through links like flipping through pages, more of a tree than a book though. They wouldn’t understand the interaction with others, it’d be super limited library internet pre 2000s experience in a way.
Tbh they’d be having a better experience than we are now in 99% of cases now
Yea no chatbot telling them high octane nightmare fuel about cock roaches, they’ll be limited to someone’s little homebrew llm they encounter at best.
Semi related rant:
Honestly with how the internet is right now, I hate it more than I like it. There are very few places I can visit on it for fun. Lemmygrad and Hexbear are like me refuges from the ever encroaching slop and neocities is the place to explore. Youtube is like the only mainstream social media that I still use, but if not for my addiction to it I think I would’ve dumped it long ago. Gotta keep trying to do so I guess.
Overall it’s even more horrible to actually look for useful information, all of it fucking sucks whether it is SEO or AI garbage. And because the Internet is such a core part of computing, it’s hard to imagine it without it… Like how the fuck else am I going to get software on my system? Yeah sure, Debian can packages from CDs, but that is a remnant from a different time.
I want to love the internet, and in the deepness of my heart I really do. But capitalism is making that harder every day. And another part why I’m hating the internet more and more, is because of how entrenching it is and how destructive it is to other types of media storage or presentation. Text, video, sound, games, it’s encompassing everything now. Even digital media slowly but surely will stop existing on physical media, and that’s why I’m creating and curating my own home archive library. Because I don’t know when that one site finally goes offline, and when it does… I’ll miss it.
It’s not much, it’s futile, maybe idiotic. But I love doing this. I love having my data locally, well preserved for myself. But there’s just so much garbage, it’s only a tiny curated set that I nonetheless love sharing with people, because I care about it’s quality.
I’m very conflicted on how I feel about the Internet, just it, computers I love.
Actually, now that I’ve thought about the shit I wrote above. I don’t think I really have an issue with the Internet, but with the World Wide Web. I need to think and read more about it.
The wife and I keep local backups of stuff too, 'cause honestly fuck this shit.
It will be replaced with another one. When the Library of Alexandria burned down they didn’t give up on books.
Alexandria also hardly represented the end of books. But I’m envisioning like, a scenario where humanity gets yeeted in an extinction event or smth. Vibing about the ephemeral nature of all this.
Are you not underestimating the decentralisation of the internet? We’re talking about stuff that is everywhere, and being very deliberately archived and well-protected in tens, hundreds of thousands of dedicated areas around the globe.
Something like a giant meteor would probably be the best case for the internet staying permanently accessible - Meteor blows up a few thousand square miles, sunlight blockages + toxic gas kill off all/most of humanity in a couple years, and datacentres will probably be left relatively unscathed so pretty much the whole internet will be recoverable for at least a few thousand years. More protected archives may be recoverable for tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
I think, short of a catastrophic event that covers the whole globe in a few feet of lava, significant amounts of the internet will live on in recoverable archives.
I think if the internet is ever to be turned into a footnote, it’ll be by the impermanence of society - Eventually people will stop caring, move onto internet 2 and that’s all it’ll take for people to slow chuck out and demolish the data. But obviously, given the massive density of information storage, one dedicated archive is all it takes to mostly survive, it’ll only take <100 hard drives, or tapes, to store everything everyone ever publicly wrote on the internet (assuming we can filter out the AI garbage). Videos, games, hi-res pictures etc. the archiver might have to be more picky.
Unfun
But yeah Idk, big solar flare/geomagnetic storm after human negligence? I just don’t really trust the interweb to last I guess.idk how accurate it is; but i’ve heard that all that’d need to be done in the event of a solar flare would be turning off the power grid until it’s done, and there’d be hours of warning
The problem with electromagnetic pulses, which a solar flare basically is, is that they induce voltage in (even otherwise inert) metal. I think turning off the grid before a flare would reduce damage because high voltage cables wouldn’t have two sources of voltage to deal with, but wouldn’t protect us from all damage. Most local distribution infrastructure and unshielded devices would get zapped beyond their capacity whatever you do.
A solar flare would take out a massive amount of electrical infrastructure, on one side of the globe anyway. But a large portion of datacentres are shielded because putting in a bit of extra wire is a pretty small cost for a big benefit. So a lot of power/comms infrastructure would need recreating, but again, most of the data is unlikely to be lost.
It only takes one archive.org-type datacentre to survive to restore everything of any significance, and there are a fair few of those around.
Boooooo!! Death to the internet!!
Data centers are 99.9% encrypted hard drives, a scavenger has a good chances of finding working ones, but no chance of decrypting a single one, and extraordinarily tiny chance of restoring one of the internet’s current backbones, S3. The chances of finding an unencrypted hard drive strongly correlates with finding a relatively small (non-notable) company or hobbyist user’s activity. Most small datacenter tenants are sharing multiple encrypted hard drives with other smaller tenants.
When an internet ending event happens, data centered could be physically destroyed, or there could be economic reasons that clients drop services, their data will probably get overwritten with a few waves of desperate clearance priced offers by the data centers, then data center employees will one day stop showing up to work. Each data center could have a different story. CEO went AWOL? Employees just stop showing up (layoffs? died? stayed home to conserve gas? stayed home to protect family from bandits?). Security contractors abandoned the data center and other clients to take up a contract with government’s last attempt to keep things under control? Decided to become a billionaire’s armed militia?
As for personal computers, windows 10 encrypts user drives by default. Unless you’re lucky and guess a bad password, only pre-2015 windows computers will be widely unencrypted. You might not be able to figure out how to login to that computer, but you’ll be able to see some files with a linux liveCD/liveUSB.
I have no idea what percent of hobbyist linux desktop/laptop installs will be unencrypted.
While I agree with everything else, I setup a fresh win10 install yesterday and it didn’t encrypt anything automatically (although the installer might have been old enough, I made the usb stick a couple years ago)
this what MS says:
BitLocker encryption is available on supported devices running Windows 10 or 11 Pro, Enterprise, or Education.
On supported devices running Windows 10 or newer BitLocker will automatically be turned on the first time you sign into a personal Microsoft account (such as @outlook.com or @hotmail.com) or your work or school account.
BitLocker is not automatically turned on with local accounts, however you can manually turn it on in the Manage BitLocker tool.
power users hate making non-local accounts, but also IDK how many regular users have “supported” devices.
I had to login with an MS account before I could finish the install and create a local account, but I noticed I had the option to secure drives with bitlocker in the right click menu, I guess the registration process bypassed the automatic encryption
