Impermanence

I think I commented earlier this year about the abrupt disappearance of long time conservative blogger Currency Lad, and see that (as some people predicted in the comments thread which they continued to inhabit after he stopped posting) the blog itself has gone, as (I think) the domain was up for re-registration in October, and it was expected that if he had actually died (or had lost mental capacity), it would disappear.

Hence, the only record that seems to exist of his years of writing is on Trove or the Wayback Machine, and they tend to go back to his earlier blogs.  (For whatever reason, he changed blog hosts).

Now, while I had initially liked some of his takes when I first starting blogging and was more conservative, and then later found he was a dislikeable and dishonest person in debate on Catallaxy, and he ended up going full right wing nutter in his last blog, I still find it disheartening that the internet is such an impermanent place for records.

Even in this blog, the number of dead links in my older posts seems to be climbing rapidly.

I keep getting the feeling, perhaps under the influence of science fiction or Twilight Zone episodes, that we are going to one day get to the point where people are sure some vital piece of information for the survival of humanity was once to be found on a defunct website, and no one can find it anymore.   Or am I worrying too much?   I mean, the same story could be run about a lost book.   I guess it's just that the internet is more accessible to everyone, and the impermanence of information on it feels worse for that reason?  

I even lost courting emails to my wife when a free email service I used at the time went belly up.

On the other hand, who needs crap kept forever?  There are obviously billions of photographs saved online now that no one is ever going to look at again after the owner dies and their account disappears.

I don't know - the current haphazard situation of what gets preserved and what evaporates seems unsatisfactory to me.