When the internet came about, they told us anything you put on there would last forever. The digital world will never forget.

We learned — sometimes the hard way — that this was not true. It might have been true for your ridiculous takes, you had the audacity to publish on Twitte, which, judged by today's standards, made you a target of cancellation.

It is, however, not necessarily true for webpages and personal blogs, as projects like AR.IO don't tire to remind us. Every day, we're living through a small-scale burning of the Library of Alexandria, without us noticing.

Just the other day, I realized that my website was no longer showing. Not that it was a high-traffic page, but few are in our world of aggregating all information in a handful of centralized avenues.

Still, it felt like a little loss, and I continue trying to get it back, re-instored as it's a little part of me on the web.

I'm not alone with such an experience. Data loss has become so common that we just shrug and leave it be, like the dead hedgehog lying in the middle of the crossing.

The natural response to this happening has been to develop networks that prevent the loss altogether. Our dream of storing things forever is drawing closer, even if none of us will be around to check whether Arewave really lived up to the promise of 200+ years of storage.

Nevertheless, even before this happens, in a way, humans have always managed to preserve what mattered to them.

As a classical music lover, I can't escape a sense of wonder whenever I find out how a composer felt about his works, from letters he wrote himself on a sheet of paper 200 years ago. Isn't it insane that these things survived when paper is so fragile?

We even have Twitter accounts dedicated to sharing what philosophers and authors wrote in their diaries centuries ago. I can't help but wonder, how would Kafka feel knowing that his innermost thoughts are on public display in the 21st century, on a platform whose workings escape our understanding just as much as his novels?

Much of what we know about the past is thanks to the efforts of other humans to preserve and archive. The second I started thinking about what it would mean for things to be stored forever, I realized that it's insane that in crypto, no one has ever mentioned the science of archiving to me before.

In Dresden, they recently opened the Archive of Avantgarde. An immense collection of items gleaned by Egidio Manzona, a rich Italian infatuated with the avant-garde. It was my first conscious, irl encounter with an archive. I've been to plenty of museums, but never thought of them as much as archives, when really that's what they are.

When entering the Archive of Avantgarde, you're greeted by paintings, sculptures, and videos. Yet, you'll also find more everyday items such as postcards, magazines, and even the tools artists used to create their works. One thing that struck me especially was a photo of a group of avant-garde artists.

All of them were neatly dressed in suits and costumes, completely rejecting the fantasy I had of avant-garde artists being as flamboyant as their works in fashion.

Who knows whether I'd ever have found out if it wasn't for this one collector dedicating his life to the task of preserving the avant-garde?

One man, wealth, and the means to achieve his goal, fulfilling his very human desire of transcending the present and making a dent.

Isn't that the same longing that drives us to find platforms where our voices won't just disappear?

Writing has always been linked to the desire to preserve. While often nowadays degraded to writing for the sake of content creation, for people who write as a passion, it's much more than that.

It's an attempt to find one's voice, to make sense of the world, to connect with others, to assure ourselves that we're not insane, it's just the world that is.

By writing, we bottle up moments, states of mind, as they come for the future, and for our current selves.

At a larger scale, in the past, whose writing got to be preserved, and whose stories continued to be told, was always tied to power.

“There is no political power without control of the archive, if not memory.” - Derrida

History, they say, is written by the winners. How many voices have been suppressed or forgotten just because they had the wrong gender or skin color? We will never know.

Once the archive is open for everyone to write to and read from, will that change?

As Derrida reminds us, archiving is always closely linked to memory.

We want to remember, which is why we obsess over creating second brains and capturing every moment we live through with the lens of our smartphone.

Erich Fromm would diagnose us with a fixation on the mode of having instead of living in the moment. Yet, we wouldn't know this if it weren't for publishers printing his books so we could learn from him. There's that.

How do we gain any sense of self without memory? It's pretty impossible.

"But even if paper itself disappears, words will remain. We haven't lost the stories." - The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

We fear illnesses like Alzheimer's as they lead to our forgetting, our past, our beloved ones, our selves.

We live our lives as cyborgs, half online, half offline, expressing ourselves through what we do and share.

But how many times do we go back and look at all those pictures we took?

Archiving isn't just preserving what's there for generations to come; it's also often making an event. In the same way, we create a picture of ourselves, living the high life, when deep behind the facade, all the same anxieties lurk, opening their mouth, gasping for attention like Koi near the surface of the pond of your tranquility.

After all, if our lives were that great, would we feel the need to constantly document them to the outside world? Does what we write, what we share, eventually become us?

What does it mean then if all remains forever. Isn't forgetting also a healthy mechanism for us to cope? Our minds, unlike blockspace, are limited.

We'll never be able to memorize everything we've experienced. Whenever we remember, it's as much a reconstruction as it is a retrieval. It allows us to make peace with the past and find meaning in our trajectory so far.

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." - Kierkegaard

How many times do we go back to something we've written or said in the past, only to nearly die from cringe? It's a sign of us changing, our selves evolving, and with it our views and words.

The problem is, the past can also hold us hostage, especially in a world where humans are reduced to brands, and expected to adhere to consistency is key.

Having endless storage at hand, then, might not be the panacea it's made out to be.

Assuming everything on the internet will remain forever… how do we ever find the things that mean something to us?

Even on a smaller scale, the one thing people forget is: archiving is also a labour of love.

A few years ago, I decided I should start collecting links to blogs I enjoyed, and useful tools in a personal archive. I started out fanatically adding new things to it, quickly accumulating a gigantic archvie.

But the bigger the archive, the heavier the task of maintaining it.

The other day, I deleted it completely.

The thought alone of needing to figure out how to optimize this thing had been hanging over me, and the dread had kept me from ever going there.

In the end, I asked myself: what's the point?

I wanted a clean slate.

A new beginning.

In our era of cognitive outsourcing, I've started to write down in physical notebooks the quotes and ideas I really want to remember.

What's the ultimate freedom? Having access to all the information as long as you're connected or… knowing the things you really want to by heart?

It's also occurred to me that anyone confronted with a forever storage solution might quickly feel the same way I felt about my personal archive: incapable of bringing order to the chaos.

I know what the Tech Bros will say: we will just use AI agents to help us sort through the mess that was created by bot-fuelled enshittification.

Still, it doesn't address the main question that I have if we were to store everything forever: how do we encounter the relevant?

The thing that makes us feel something?

I believe the missing ingredient is humans who will dare to champion and speak up for what they find in the depths of the dark forest. And infrastructure to support it.

In the Classical Music world, there's plenty of precedent for such happenings. Think about the most famous German composer you can come up with?

Probably Bach. (or Beethoven)

He wasn't actually very popular with mainstream audiences after his death. The connoisseurs sure knew him, but average concert-goers wouldn't be familiar with his works.

A few centuries later, the Bach festival draws 75.000 visitors in Leipzig alone. For the younger people, he's become like the Taylor Swift of classical music.

What happened?

I'll tell you: Mendelssohn.

A well-respected composer and concert master himself, Mendelssohn established a practice of performing old music, especially that of Bach, as part of his concerts.

The catalyst for the now existing appreciation of Bach.

His motivation was likely a mix of his own admiration of Bach and the educational mission he saw himself on, teaching the snobs something about music that pushed them outside their comfort zone.

Who will be the champions of the work we create? Writing we put out on the internet that's already nearly 50% dominated by bots?

If everything is stored forever, who will be the archivists of that?

The ones who lead us to the cemetery of the forgotten books, guiding us to the pages where a now-forgotten writer has put into words a sentiment we've had for a long time but never knew how to express.

“In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader’s hands." - Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The more I think about it, the more I realize that I have all the questions and none of the answers.

Whenever we pretend that preserving everything forever is the solution for the current ills of the centralized mess, we assume that history is set in stone.

Yet, we all know that in our personal lives, we change, we adjust, and we're not always consistent, as is expected of a so-called personal brand.

On a larger scale, an archaeologist digging up one small artifact often triggers a massive shift in our perception of ancient civilizations.

For the longest, our view of history was that progress was linear. We were always moving forward, never back.

Even today's technodeterminists want you to believe as much that, in the end, there's abundance, the panacea for all our ills.

Unfortunately, this view is flawed. While not a history student, as an interested museum-goer, I can't forget learning about the discovery of the antikythera mechanism, the world's oldest calculator — some even call it computer — discovered in 1901, which led us to realize once again that progress was not a linear, but a boom and bust.

Believed to have been built during the late first or second century BC, it was used to calculate the positions of various astrological bodies.

With such a fantastic technology at hand, you'd assume the subsequent centuries would see further advances, but the opposite happened.

The mechanism was lost, and we regressed to more primitive ways of celestial happenings.

Will future civilizations dig through the mess we're leaving online in the same way and find artifacts that speak to our progress and ensuing regression?

Who will be those championing the voices from the fringes, those that are always at risk of getting drowned out by the algorithm-induced pressure to conform for clicks?

If memory is so closely tied to forgiveness, and, as Margaret Atwood would point out, debt, can we ever hope to start anew?

If the current archive is held in the hands of those in power, the ledger controlled by those who have the wealth, why wouldn't — as so often happened in the past — the majority be inclined to simply burn it?

P.S I don't have the answers. All I have is a lot of questions I rarely ever see discussed by those parading forever storage as the solution.

This essay was written for the Lens x Fountain Summer Creative Contest.

Cover image: Otto Painting: Freedom of the Unity