All things rot
the digital world is not immune
Decay is a natural and healthy part of any ecosystem. It is part of the lifecycle, where things are unmade so that they can be remade. And all things decay over a long enough timespan -- that includes me, you, the microplastics in our blood, radiactive isotopes we left in the soil, mountains, worlds, stars. All things decay eventually, but some things decay more enthusiastically. On the scale of "fallen leaf" to "fallen tree", the digital world decays at a rate closer to the leaf.
The internet is rotting, its synaptic memory breaking down. The art and media that have historically formed the backbone of human culture are vanishing. Our stories are being lost.
How much of your life is digital?
How much of humanity's collective experience exists primarily in a digital space?
The digital world is so weird. On one hand, it feels transient, unimportant, mostly brainrot memes and slop, half-baked thoughts and transient data. But on the other hand, it's the bastion of subcultures, weirdos, art freaks and storytelling. Turns out when you give everyone a megaphone, you get a whole lotta yelling, but that still matters for many people who were listening closely, trying to find their strange kin.
In this way, I posit that the digital world isn't an object or a static space that is rotting, but a living ecosystem. As such, some decay is necessary: we can't keep everything, the ecosystem can't spport it. But at the same time, our aggressive clearcutting of digital spaces is scarring the landscape in a way that will never fully recover. We can grow something new, but we can never regrow what we've lost.
I was born in 1990 and due to tech-minded parents, got internet access in 1997 (questionable choice, honestly, but I'm grateful). The landscape of my memory is shared between the digital and physical worlds. It's chatrooms and forums and niche fandoms and live journals. My memory is coded in HTML and CSS.
But so much of that is already gone. The Internet Archive publishes a report called Vanishing Culture, where they look at how digital media and public memory. While you or I might lose our childhood photos to a facebook server, collectively, we're losing so much more. The Digital Preservation Coalition publishes Global ‘Bit List’ of Endangered Digital Materials where they assess the risk of various types of digital objects through the lens of endangered species. The internet is an ecosystem, and it is going through an extinction event.
The internet is an ecosystem
If the internet is an ecosystem, then AI is an invasive species. Instead of being introduced slowly and finding its place in the balance, it arrived quickly and out-competed the indigenous media, spreading quickly until the original inhabitants could no longer compete.
The situation was already precarious: now it's an emergency. The internet and all of our digital culture is rotting, and we need to take immediate action to save what matters.
If left up the chance, the extinction patterns are not random. This isn't a natural evolution of the ecosystem, but a violent takeover where what lives and dies is determined by the hegemonic powers, a perfect reflection of the social order. We don't have to worry about losing the Marvel movies -- there are two many copies, too much money behind them. But we do have to worry about losing that queer zine or leftist forum or niche performance medium where we record ourselves playing roleplaying games and make that into shows.
