A look at Remember the Internet, a series of pocket-sized books dedicated to immortalizing subcultures and combating the ephemerality of being online
often because the people in charge cast things off on a whim https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Adrienne LaFrance / @adriennelaf : “We really thought we were doing something revolutionary... in a very aestheticized, Hot Topic, corporate sort of way.” @kait_tiffany's latest: https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Quinn / @quinmyers : my book abt google glass is almost done and i promise i'm trying my hardest but in the meantime u should read this v good and exciting overview of @Instarbooks' series by @kait_tiffany https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Kaitlyn Tiffany / @kait_tiffany : something nice!! i wrote about @Instarbooks and the idea of preserving the history of the internet in an endless series of memoirs https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... @theatlantic : No archive can fully capture the feeling of life online. A new serialized encyclopedia of internet subcultures is trying to do better, writes @kait_tiffany: https://on.theatln.tc/KGFz2o0 @internetarchive : What's the best way to remember the Internet? Could it be through....books? https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Internet culture has been quietly losing its own record for a decade: when Google left archival projects in limbo in 2015, the Internet Archive stepped in as the default custodian of digital history, while recent work on link rot and the Perma project shows even scholarly citations decay faster than anyone planned for. Institutional preservation, however, has its own fragility — Brewster Kahle's archive is now locked in existential copyright battles with rights holders like UMG.
First-order effects
- Remember the Internet gives individual subcultures a permanent artifact outside the platforms that hosted them, with contributors like Quinn already deep into a Google Glass volume and Kaitlyn Tiffany's Atlantic writeup giving the series its mainstream audience.
Second-order effects
- Print sidesteps the legal exposure constraining web-scale archivists: where the Internet Archive fights music labels over copies of hosted files, a pocket book about a subculture carries no equivalent takedown risk, making small publishers an unexpected preservation channel.
Third-order effects
- If the series holds, cultural memory of the internet splits into two tiers — machine archives defending their legal right to exist, and human-curated artifacts like these books carrying the interpretive record — echoing the case writers made for human-curated 'slow media' replacing algorithmic feeds.
The trend: Preservation of internet culture is shifting from centralized, legally embattled archives toward distributed, human-curated formats that no platform or rights holder can revoke.