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.

My real world identity is not explicitly tied to my online persona, and if all goes right, hopefully it will stay that way. The real me is not whatever arbitrary designation I was bequeathed by my English speaking parents, it's not even the physical characteristics I present to the world based primarily on the genetic lottery.

The real me is how I express myself. At present, the internet provides the most direct way of accomplishing this task. If I make you feel something, make you remember the words I say, that could be enough to help you understand the real me. In this way, I could live on forever.

In a significant step forward for digital preservation, Google Search is now making it easier than ever to access the past. Starting today, users everywhere can view archived versions of webpages directly through Google Search, with a simple link to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

divergentrays recently shared this on her weekly wrap-up, and i absolutely love it. might share some i make later.

Research shows 25% of web pages posted between 2013 and 2023 have vanished. A few organisations are racing to save the echoes of the web, but new risks threaten their very existence.

I’ve seen quips to the effect of “if public libraries were invented today, they’d be outlawed.” The joke is increasingly becoming reality, most recently thanks to a decision in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

Particularly in a country where we’re seeing rapidly intensifying campaigns against books, libraries, and librarians, I am extremely concerned by an outcome that not only imposes further limits on how libraries can provide books to the people who need them, but seems to view libraries as detrimental to society. We must fight to protect our rights to read freely, and fight back against the censorship, surveillance, and rent-seeking that publishers and book distribution platforms have been working to not only normalize, but protect by law.

I'm happy to report that this page (like most housework) will never be finished. It is a living document that grows and matures, just like most of real life. It is not a "work in progress", for this would imply not much intrinsic value until that magic day it is completed.