We’ve all heard the warning that “The internet is forever.” But in reality, huge swaths of the digital world are disappearing all the time: websites go dark, governments purge public records, social media posts vanish, and streaming platforms remove films and music, Without deliberate efforts to preserve this material, much of our recent history could simply cease to exist. The Internet Archive has spent decades fighting that disappearance, most nottably through its Wayback Machine, which preserves snapshots of a web that is otherwise constantly being rewritten. Current Affairs spoke with Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, and librarian Chris Freeland, co-editor of the Internet Archive’s new Vanishing Culture report, about why the internet is far more fragile than we think and what is lost when corporations and governments can make information disappear.

From blog via This RSS Feed.