I dated this guy for a few months in 2015, back when I was 23. It was wonderful for a while, then it ended poorly. I won’t bore you with the details, though I can tell you our break-up was so unpleasant that, for years, it managed to entirely overshadow the delights of the brief relationship that had taken place beforehand.
It took me a long time to get over it completely, and even longer to wish to revisit it. For some reason, we’d conducted a lot of our daily conversations on Google Chat. I could see the history of it on the left-hand side of my inbox, winking at me every day for years. In 2020, stuck at home, I realised I was ready to read it all again, and briefly immerse myself in a past that no longer ached.
I took a deep breath, clicked on the little window, and… nothing happened. There was nothing there. I’ve no idea what happened to our chat: maybe he was able to delete it all, maybe the archive had a time limit to it, maybe something went wrong somewhere. All I knew was that there had once been something I felt I could go back to whenever I wished, and now it was gone. It was too late.
Three years later, some unseen forces pulled the rug out from under me again. Between the ages of 12 and 15, I ran a series of blogs. At first these were about my life – what happened at school and in my circus classes, what my friends and I had been discussing that day – then about the indie music I started becoming obsessed with when I was 13.
They weren’t exactly literary masterpieces, but I did read them again at some point in my 20s, and found it fascinating to already be able to spot so many parts of myself, all in the process of being born. I felt so lucky and glad that all of it was out there for me to look back on, like a diary that happened to be public.
What I didn’t know was that in 2023, the French platform that hosted all our blogs went offline for good. I don’t always keep up with what goes on in the fatherland, and so managed to miss the news entirely. I only realised what had happened at the end of that year, when I went to do my five-year check-in on my old teenage self and found nothing there. I was crestfallen.
A few weeks later, inspiration struck and I realised that Wayback Machine, the website run by the Internet Archive, would perhaps be able to help me. I was right: over time, it had saved over a dozen snapshots of my old blogs, meaning that, though most of my posts have disappeared, I can still hold on to a few, precious scraps of memories. I am more thankful for those than words could say.
I am also mentioning it now as a way to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Internet Archive, which was launched in May 1996. Back in December, it reached an even bigger milestone, having officially archived 1,000bn internet pages. What a joy to know that some of my musings from over the years are hidden in there, alongside the words of hundreds of millions of other people. How bittersweet, to worry that things may be about to take a turn for the worse.
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Earlier this year, more than 20 major outlets – including the New York Times and USA Today – decided to start blocking Wayback Machine from automatically archiving their pages, as AI large language models had been found to feed on content saved by the Internet Archive.
The decision is understandable, yet feels like the probable end of an era. For a long time, we were told – and often warned – that what was posted online would remain online for ever. It felt like both a promise and a threat: something that was, oddly, claustrophobic yet reassuring at the same time.
Of course, what it ended up being was a lie. As a study from the Pew Research Center found a couple of years ago, 38% of web pages that existed in 2013 were no longer there in 2023. Journalists will know this intimately, as they – we – have lived through the stomach-churning experience of going to seek one of our pieces, only to find that either it or the whole publication had been dragged offline.
For a long time, we could at least rely on archives to save a version of our work. What will happen to us now that so many newspapers and magazines refuse to collaborate with Wayback Machine? What will happen to all of us? We collectively spent a long time worrying about the possibility of daft old jokes resurfacing and ruining our lives. What we didn’t spend anywhere near enough time considering was the possibility that all of this would eventually be lost.
I spent over 20 years pouring so much of myself into a series of screens and I always assumed that, in exchange, I would always get to keep access to all these past versions of myself. What an odd feeling it is, to watch myself get erased again, bit by bit. What a disappointment.
