Back in 1996 I was driving to work in the Clearwater, Florida area and saw a billboard to Brainbuzz.com, now viewable only through the Wayback Machine. I joined, and I ended up writing for them. Not around anymore.

They became CramSession.com, where I continued writing for them. I had roughly 100 articles I wrote for them about software engineering and C++ which are just… gone. Granted, that was over 2 decades ago, but it’s peculiar to live longer than all these companies that thrived during the Dot Com Bubble, which should be taught in high school now as a part of world history. It isn’t, of course, but it should.

Consciously, we distill good things and keep moving them forward, but sometimes because of copyright laws, things get orphaned in companies that closed their digital doors. Generations afterward, it’s hard to convey this lack of permanence to future generations because the capacity for things to last ‘forevah’ seems to be built into some social media, but it’s hidden away by algorithms which is effectively the same thing.

Sometimes bubbles of information get trapped in the walls of an imploded company. It could happen even to the present 800 lb gorillas on the Internet now. The future is one thing that nobody will tell you in their end of the year posts: It’s unpredictable. The world changes more and more rapidly and we forget how much gets left behind at times.

“When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver’s watch, that “wonderful kind of engine…a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal,” they identified it immediately as the god he worshiped. After all, “he seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action in his life.” To Jonathan Swift in 1726 that was worth a bit of satire. Modernity was under way. We’re all Gullivers now. Or are we Yahoos?”

Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, James Gleick, 2000.

What’s really funny about that quote is that Yahoo.com was more of a player in the search engine space back then. In fact, in 1998, Yahoo was the most popular search engine, and that it’s still around is actually a little impressive given all that happened after the DotCom Bubble popped. So the quote itself hasn’t aged that well which demonstrates the point I am making.

Nothing really lasts on the Internet, and even with the WayBack machine (thank you, Internet Archive!), much of what was is simply no longer, subject to what companies owned copyrights of the information, or a simple matter of what things have been kept around through what boils down to popularity.

And what’s popular isn’t always good. I submit to you any elected official you dislike to demonstrate that popularity is subjective – and on the Internet, popularity is largely about marketing and money spent toward that end. The Internet, as it stands, is the house that we built based on what made money.

That’s not particularly attractive.

In the end, it all sort of falls away. And coming generations will see it as well, some may have already begun seeing it.

Who decides what stays on the Internet? Why, we do of course, one click at a time.

Now imagine this fed into an artificial intelligence’s deep learning model. The machine learning would be taught only what has survived, not what has failed -and this could be seen as progress. I think largely it is, despite myself – but what important stuff do we leave behind?

We don’t know, because it ain’t there.