A look at link rot, and projects like Perma, which are trying to give authors of enduring documents like scholarly papers a way to preserve links permanently
Sixty years ago the futurist Arthur C. Clarke observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Tweets: @lanceulanoff , @ethanz , @heghoulian , @drewsthatdude , @samvilkins , @jonahedwards , @paulg , @zittrain , @adriennelaf , @matthewkeyslive , @grimmelm , @film_girl , @prof_gabriele , @berkmanonlyfans , @anjacks0n , and @lljohnston Tweets: Lance Ulanoff / @lanceulanoff : A really worthwhile long read about the impermanent and malleable Internet and all the risks it entails https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Ethan Zuckerman / @ethanz : JZ (@zittrain) on link rot and the fragility of knowlege: “Libraries in these scenarios are no longer custodians for the ages of anything, whether tangible or intangible, but rather poolers of funding to pay for fleeting access to knowledge elsewhere.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... @heghoulian : Brings to mind the Baudrillardian ‘collapse of the Real’. Since if the web is now our map of the so-called real world, it's a map that's ever-changing. Imagine an atlas where countries or even whole continents just suddenly disappear, or new ones appear. https://twitter.com/... Fiato Steelhands / @drewsthatdude : Please buy a bunch of hard drives and Save every piece of media you love. Datpiff won't be here for much longer https://twitter.com/... Sam Vilkins / @samvilkins : not much to say other than this is “very good” and I “strongly recommend reading it”, but also I've for various reasons been thinking/talking about mundane & technological time travel lately — which is woven a lot through this piece and utterly corrupting my sense of regular life https://twitter.com/... Jonah Edwards / @jonahedwards : “People tend to overlook the decay of the modern web, when in fact these numbers are extraordinary—they represent a comprehensive breakdown in the chain of custody for facts.” Required reading: https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Paul Graham / @paulg : “50 percent of the links embedded in Court opinions since 1996, when the first hyperlink was used, no longer worked. And 75 percent of the links in the Harvard Law Review no longer worked.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Jonathan Zittrain / @zittrain : Hard to say what's more worrisome for the preservation of humanity's knowledge today: the fact that online sources disappear without warning, or that they can be changed without anyone noticing? https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Adrienne LaFrance / @adriennelaf : Spectacular, and terrifying, by @zittrain: https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Matthew Keys / @matthewkeyslive : The Internet is just a giant knowledge time-share. https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... James Grimmelmann / @grimmelm : I'm not optimistic about our ability to convince people a ten thousand years from now not to substantially disturb this place physically if we can't even tell people ten years from now not to delete this video. https://twitter.com/... Christina Warren / @film_girl : This article is incredible and it encapsulates something I've been speaking about for close to a decade. Truly, if I could have a “dream” job, I think working on how to archive/preserve the web would be right up there. https://twitter.com/... Matt Gabriele / @prof_gabriele : hello! I'd like to introduce you to medieval/ pre-modern archives! this isn't a new problem, though of course the scope of written information is much larger. #twitterstorians 1/2 https://twitter.com/... @berkmanonlyfans : At 1 point i was working on a novel set during Katrina and I found this phenomenon very alarming: a majority of links even in official documents led to dead websites or no longer hosted content. It's actually pretty alarming that's less than 2 decades ago https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Andy Jackson / @anjacks0n : Great to see a well-written article like this, hopefully getting the message out. My only complaint would be where it says we need policies and technologies, which I would consider necessary but not sufficient. UKWA has policies and the tech is within reach, but we need funding. https://twitter.com/... Leslie Johnston / @lljohnston : An important article on the history of the Web, research into link rot, and web archiving technologies and research. https://twitter.com/...