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.
turned them into vague swarms of monads.
I bet you $100 this dude has never read Leibniz
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.
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.
A cool project would be a massive stone codex that teaches the reader how to read magnetic tapes
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!
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!!
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.
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
I hope it does. This whole machine can go fuck itself
