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there's something uncomfortable in how the internet is such a centralising force despite being decentralised.
the clearest example of this to me is how one specific website, https://web.archive.org/, is as important as the whole of the rest of the web put together
the internet makes knowledge so easily accessible that it can simply be forgotten. works get put online and no copies are produced, because why produce copies of something when you can get one instantly at any time? until of course the site goes down. the great forgetting machine
the internet as we experience it now is a vast, instantly accessible library, but that same internet will be experienced by future generations as something more like the bible. a single book, a curated collection of the handful of things that survived the great forgetting machine
actually, i shouldn't say that the internet is a library. the significance of the library of alexandria was that it collected copies of many valuable writings in one place. the internet is not a place and does not contain copies. https://web.archive.org … is, perhaps.
what upsets me about the internet is that it is like the un-making of the printing press. humans had written knowledge long before there was an ability to mass-produce it. books were once scarce items. copying them was labour-intensive, it was easier to travel to consult them.
the invention of print let us mass-produce works, creating so many copies of them that they had a fighting chance of surviving against entropy and enduring for the next generation.
the internet is the death of this, because now we can “travel” too easily
https://social.noyu.me/@hikari/statuses/01HKWK0RHA1MY2KC0C8DP940P9
what i'm saying is: download the things you love. download even the things you like, that you find any significance in at all. hoard data. disk space scarcity is more or less no longer real if you have even a small amount of money to spend. anything that is not saved will be lost