The human need to preserve memories, knowledge, and experiences is as old as civilization itself. Neolithic tribes painted cave walls to document hunts, Mesopotamians etched grain harvest records into clay tablets, and medieval scribes meticulously copied manuscripts to safeguard knowledge. Yet despite these efforts, much was lost to history until the printing press revolutionised information sharing, making knowledge universally accessible.
A second revolution arrived in the mid- to late-1990s with the World Wide Web, hailed as an “Infinite Library” accessible to anyone with an internet connection. But the assumption that digital content lasts forever is increasingly proving false.
Recently, I revisited bookmarks accumulated over 25 years of internet use, only to find most links now defunct. Many led to extraordinary examples of human creativity: art, essays, and forums all erased. This phenomenon, known as link rot, is accelerating as companies shutter, hosting subscriptions lapse, and platforms vanish overnight. In 2013, The New York Times highlighted its pervasive impact: 49% of hyperlinks in U.S. Supreme Court opinions no longer functioned.
Compounding this loss is platform aggregation: tech giants absorb smaller platforms, stripping them of their uniqueness or shutting them down entirely. Users now funnel into homogenised ecosystems, trading diverse online spaces for a handful of corporate-controlled hubs.
As original content created by humans disappears in the form of disappearing websites and platform aggregation we have seen the rise of content generated by BOTs and Generative AI. The implications of this loss are far-reaching, the loss of personal websites, smaller blogs and rich internet forums means academic and historical research will suffer. Freedom of information will suffer as only a few corporations will have control over all the content and Governments will be able to control narratives more tightly and delete content at will.
Projects like the Internet Archive and The Way Back machine attempt to store snapshots of websites before they disappear however they too face legal challenges and limitations in capturing most of the content now only hosted by the large aggregators.
We are witnessing a massive evaporation of our digital legacy as we are forced to confront the fragility of collective human memory and the impermanence of all things. The internet is not as permanent as it once seemed which is a reminder of our own mortality. As human creativity dwindles in favour of AI-generated substitutes, we must ask: Is this the slow death of the world wide web, or the evolution of new, Synthetic Digital Lifeforms?
