Olu Online

permanent

last updated 4 days, 17 hours ago

should you act like everything you put online is going to permanently stored there? should you act like every social media post you make might be screenshotted and pulled up at a moment's notice? i think a lot of people say yes to the latter, and a lot less would say yes to the former. many would act like assuming your social media won't be scrutinised at some point is the height of foolishness. i frequently forget to make backups, but if my one of my cloud providers went offline tomorrow and i lost all my stuff i would be sad, not surprised.

i made a short about my opinion, and a few commenters commented like they thought i'd never heard that "the internet is forever" and similar truisms. i don't think it's controversial to say "avoid saying or doing things in places where they may get you in trouble, if it's not the trouble you want, anyway1", and online is and was and will be a place for as long as we have it. but i don't think that means all or even most things you say online are forever. tapes decay. so do CDs and so do SSDs. maybe you weren't thinking on such a long time scale; link rot means that up to a quarter of the links from the last ten years don't go to their original, intended page.

i don't know about you, but there are countless things i have lost to the internet's shoddy memory. my first ever website on myspace, which lost all its user data in 2016. my next ever website on neopets, which fairly as a kids site wasn't indexed on the way back machine, but also purged all its previous user data. i've forgotten usernames to things i deleted on purpose (deviantart, livejournal) so maybe someone else with a better memory from my past could look me up, but i'll never know!

when it comes to earworms2 and half remembered things that don't come from big institutions, our collective memory is terrible. now we have so much capacity for storage there's some latent assumption this will get better, that every ad, song, show and film will be up forever, despite the fact i see stories all the time about what would be "lost media" if it wasn't for piracy from the last ten years.

permanence is an illusion! save whatever you want in multiple places! who knows when it'll disappear.

this piece is part of my attempt at alphabet superset, a “6-month” creative challenge (i passed a year in september 2024 — with a long break! — and the creator of the challenge hasn’t finished yet either). other posts so far: abolition, bump, boost, culture, discussion, english, formulaic, gone, home, immortality, jargon, knowledge, leaving, monotony and no.

if you liked this post, please:

  1. excuse the x, but yeah, good trouble is what we seek!↩

  2. "use your magic touch, don't look at your fingers, use your brain to type by touch, use your magic touch" is what i remember the opening jingle from a touch typing software from infant school being, can find nothing reminiscent online. one example!↩

#alphabet-superset