Earlier this month, MTV News abruptly pulled their site off the web without warning, eliminating a virtual archive of pop culture news stories that date back to 1997. This move coincided with a series of similar decisions from MTV’s parent company Paramount, including a similar move on CMT, and the swift removal of 25 years of video footage from Comedy Central previously hosted on the web.
All of this probably amounts to a line-item and a tax write-off as Paramount comes off another historically bad quarter they seem to have completely missed the point on. And just like that, a huge swatch of the web, and our cultural history, has blipped out of existence.
Thankfully it was at least in part saved by the Internet Archive, who have setup a page specifically to host the articles they have archived in a searchable format.
The Internet Archive exists at the behest of a dedicated team that works on it, and through sheer force of will of its creator Brewster Kahle, who started the project in 1996, from his attic. When Kahle first brought on a team to help him, he reportedly gave everybody who came on board a copy of the book “The Vanishing Library,” about the Library of Alexandria and its famous flame out. His hope was that the Internet Archive could act as a modern successor to the Library of Alexandria, one with far more reach and potential than the original.
To that end, the Internet Archive has been successful. It’s held up a historical account of the web at a considerable scale. Time and time again, when the web goes into crisis and part of it is lost, the Internet Archive and similar efforts come to the rescue. But even the Internet Archive is having a hard time protecting against a barrage of link rot we can’t seem to get away from.
Cool URI’s Don’t Change
In 1998, Tim Berners-Lee took to the W3 website to post a handy little guide called “Cool URIs Don’t Change.”
“Pretty much the only good reason for a document to disappear from the Web,” he wrote, was that “the company which owned the domain name went out of business or can no longer afford to keep the server running.” Berners-Lee put the URL at the center of the web’s design. He was advocating for website owners to keep hyperlinks sacred as he had intended.
But the same year that guide was published, Jakob Nielsen was already tracking an increasing trend towards link rot. In 1998, the web less than a decade old, 6% of all links on the web were already completely dead. It turns out plenty of people were perfectly willing to be uncool.
This problem has gotten much, much worse since. If you take a look at the numbers now, it’s downright bleak. Half of all links will be completely gone within 7 years, and the total number of links just fully inaccessible at this point could be as high as 70%.
Around that time, Steven Johnson—who had gained some notoriety as the co-founder of FEED magazine—published his book Interface Culture about the semiotics and culture of the web even as it was evolving. Like Berners-Lee, Johnson held the hyperlink in high regard and devoted an entire chapter to its grammatical nuances, calling it the “first significant new form of punctuation to emerge in centuries.”
Johnson describes how even in the first few years, there were writers who deftly used hyperlinks to not just send people somewhere else, but to inflect their writing with subtext and meaning. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the sardonic commentary by the writers of Suck magazine. Johnson pointed to one particular running gag on Suck, that whenever they used the word “sell out,” they’d link to themselves. An inside joke that only became apparent by following the link.
The rest of the web saw hypertext as an electrified table of contents, or as a supply of steroid-addled footnotes. The Sucksters saw it as a way of phrasing a thought. They attached links to the fabric of their sentence, like an adjective vamping up a noun, or a parenthetical clause that conveys a sense of unease with the main premise of the sentence.
Johnson goes on to recognize other uses of the hyperlink, which he calls “links of association.” When writers turned to links to connect and associate ideas, it created meaning that was greater than a single webpage on its own island.
The link should usually be understood as a synthetic device, a tool that brings mutlifarious elements together in some kind of orderly unity.
Links give greater meaning to our webpages. Without the link, we would lose this significant grammatical tool native the web. And as links die out and rot on the vine, what’s at stake is our ability to communicate in the proper language of hypertext.
A dead link may not seem like it means very much, even in the aggregate. But they are. One-way links, the way they exist on the web where anyone can link to anything, is what makes the web universal. In fact, the first name for URL’s was URI’s, or Universal Resource Identifier. It’s right there in the name. And as Berners-Lee once pointed out, “its universality is essential.”
In other words, it’s the link between things that gives us a web. Otherwise, we’d just be looking at the document. Hyperlinks might be one of the most incredible innovations of the 20th century. And they are breaking apart.
The Library of Alexandria
How many times can the Internet Archive save us before it’s unable to keep pace?
As the web has expanded, the burden of a small number of archive services have expanded, which makes them vulnerable. We’ve come to rely on a single point of failure caught amidst infinite scale, active blockers, paywalls, and government-led censorship.
Kahle’s original book recommendation—about the burning of Alexandria—might have been too on the nose. And it’s turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bret Victor made a similar point in 2015, when he advocated for a system where larger parts of the web could be owned (and downloaded) by individuals.
We, as a species, are currently putting together a universal repository of knowledge and ideas, unprecedented in scope and scale. Which information-handling technology should we model it on? The one that’s worked for 4 billion years and is responsible for our existence? Or the one that’s led to the greatest intellectual tragedies in history?
We need, possibly, to make this system more resilient. And we can only do that by expanding the surface area. I think we are quite possibly entering an era of the web that is more fragmented and decentralized by design. Why can’t we each walk around with a piece of the web downloaded to our device, carried around in our pocket, stored for a day when it no longer exists?
