alexandra's pile of notes

Attempts to quantify the scope of the problem are heartbreaking. Half of links in US Supreme Court decisions no longer lead to the information being cited. A report in 2021 found that a full quarter of the more than 2.2 million hyperlinks on The New York Times website were broken. Even worse, the Pew Research Center estimates that a quarter of everything put on the web from 2013 to 2023 is inaccessible — meaning almost 40% of the web as it existed in 2013 is simply not there today, a decade later.

The degradation of those links wouldn't panic me so much if they hadn't replaced what came before them — if museum storerooms and dusty library stacks still served as the warehouses of our collective memory.