Whenever I hit the internet safety portion of my basic computer class, I hammer home the point that the internet never forgets. “If you wouldn’t want it posted on a billboard, don’t post it online” was an adage that my mother gave me once or twice, and whenever I weigh the pros and cons of posting something, most often these blog posts, a billboard flashes across my mind.
I’ve believed for so long that the internet is forever, both in the good ways and the bad ways. Invariably there are news stories about a minor celebrity getting canceled for making offensive comments in 2018, and yet scrolling through my old Twitter account reminds me of little moments lost to the shifting sands of memory. “Nothing is ever really deleted!” I cry during class.
But my world shifted a little when the Discord server that I had spent a year of my life in—sixty thousand messages, thousands of games, countless hours explaining niche game mechanics—crashed and burned over the course of three hours. This space, my first home on the internet, where I made my first internet friends, buckled under its own mismanagement and got unexpectedly deleted by the server owner.
It was like someone carved out my stomach. It had never crossed my mind that this forum which housed records of so many precious memories with friends (and reference information that I used to help me teach others), the beginning of our stories together, could so unceremoniously disappear. I wasn’t allowed to give my final goodbyes, and I only escaped with the most essential information due to frantic archiving after I caught the whiff of drama. We landed together, my friends and I, but we were now nomads, forced from our home.
Now, those sixty thousand messages only live in the smattering of screenshots, the moments that made someone laugh enough to save or messages snidely snipped in order to be made fun of elsewhere. In this way, the memory of the internet is forever like I preach, decentralized and fragmented but impossible to control. It is forever in the way that every teenager screenshots a text message to send to a friend in disbelief, in the way that grandmothers download pictures off of Facebook and print them out.
But in another way, the slate was wiped completely clean. A friend said this server’s deletion felt like the burning of the library of Alexandria (which is probably a little bit of an exaggeration). If my friend had not combed through the thanksgiving messages channel, we would have lost the sweet messages we wrote to each other. If I hadn’t kept a Google Doc version of the FAQ for the server, if a friend hadn’t saved some of the images commonly referenced, I would have had to rebuild it from solely my own memory. I cannot look up messages I sent a year ago when I first saw the event that I have spent a year in-game preparing for; the origin stories of inside jokes are now beyond my reach.
In this way, the memory of the internet is elusive. If you have the evidence, someone actually maintained a backup, the camera is pointed at the correct patch of forest, you’ve caught the slippery thing. But if you were looking somewhere else, if you believed that website would stay up forever, if the camera is pointed the other way, you are out of luck. Believe that your case is ironclad and you lose it all. Store your files in the wrong place and everything goes up in smoke.
I’m not going to even try to get into AI and all those delightful doors it opens up, but from photoshop to deep fakes, it’s hard to trust even screenshots and videos—the most solid memory the internet can offer apart from the Wayback Machine.
I have relied on the mind of the internet being long, from storing my photos in the cloud to picturing billboards with my tweets (xs?) to meticulously archiving recipes to Google Docs. It is certainly better than mine—my calendar is the only reason I will submit this post on time. But it is far from perfect, and for one of the first times I am paying the price for blindly trusting that the digital things valuable to me are safe anywhere else but my hard drive (and even then…).
The internet never forgets. But sometimes when people delete things, especially massive communities, those memories fracture into a thousand pieces and fall into the digital cracks. You could fish out the shards; you could dive into the backend and rebuild it. It’s easier to just admit that they are gone.
Alex Johnson (‘19) is a virtual computer science teacher and a proud resident of Grand Rapids. When she’s not brainstorming the newest project to inflict on her students, she’s cooking semi-vegetarian food, reading too many romance books, and playing rhythm games.
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I lost access to all the messages shared in a group chat I was part of from ages 13-16, where we exchanged thousands of messages a day (Skype updated and had created a duplicate account that locked me out of my original), so I feel this one big time.