Ever since its introduction to the general public in the early 1990s, the internet has served as our most thorough collective living record of contemporary human history – however, it is one which, as time passes and technology improves, is continually burning away its own past. While it has yet to become an issue of great importance to most, the slow erasure of the internet’s past by its incompatibility with current web infrastructure, the impermanence of web hosting, our deeply archaic copyright system, or other various issues, is one that has vast implications going forward – and one that a dedicated, grassroots community (lacking the funding and resources of academic historical pursuits) has been forced to solve itself. While the internet is undoubtedly the most comprehensive source of 21st century media archaeology, it is one far more fickle and impermanent than any previous, and despite its promise of eternal preservation of information – the only knowledge that the industry seems interested in saving is the personal information and searching habits which have become the engines of their profit. The selective hiding and erasure of inconvenient information to these companies, as well, is already something that has begun to manifest, and it remains to be seen what the effect of a precisely distorted version of history, even more dependant on the whims of capital than our previous historical structure, will have on how the future will see our recent past and present.

As Douglas Davis states in the introduction to The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction: “There is no longer a clear conceptual distinction between original and reproduction in virtually any medium. The two states, one pure and one original, the other imitative and impure, are now fictions […] The dead replica and the living, authentic original are merging, like lovers entwined in mutual ecstasy.” (p. 381) There certainly remains a truth to this – media from before the age of the internet, and contemporary works in those more traditional forms have remained, for the most part, thoroughly and accessible preserved through digital copies, now the predominant form of engaging with these mediums. However, the disconnect between “the dead replica and the living, authentic original” still exists within, ironically, the very art and media spawned by this digital revolution. While there are certainly exceptions – carefully, lovingly preserved artifacts of early websites and internet art, the vast majority of even the more famous and well-remembered early internet media are preserved only as partially broken husks of their former selves, if they are preserved at all. Links become dead, art assets are broken by modern browsers, Adobe Flash games or other interactive projects, and many other staples of the early internet experience are simply erased by time and evolving technology. 

Much of this half-broken evidence of the early internet only exists through community-driven and funded efforts like the Internet Archive, with major internet and telecommunications companies, or even academia, seeming to have no interest in the preservation of this history. However, as time inevitably passes to the point when there is no one left from the pre-Internet age, it remains to be seen if internet history and archaeology will become a more vital part of our collective drive to preserve and analyze the past – though, as the internet is continually driven away from its decentralized structure and into the hands of an increasingly small amount of corporations, the risk of large swaths of our modern history becoming entirely extinguished will perhaps be determined entirely by the health of these ever-expanding conglomerates. Though, there will remain a dedicated community of amateur historians/preservationists as there are today, and this still-niche corner of media archaeology provides a window into what will perhaps be wide-reaching implications for future historiographical thought and practice.

In a 2019 BBC article by Stephen Dowling, Jason Webber, engagement director of the Internet Archive, explained: “The Internet Archive first started archiving pages in 1996. That’s five years after the first webpages were set up. There’s nothing from that era that was ever copied from the live web.” Those first primordial years, before popular proliferation of the internet, have largely remained lost – and it has only become a larger and larger struggle to maintain the history that immediately followed this erased stretch of time. However, despite crashing up against issues of incompatibility at every turn, there has been a great deal of effort taken (largely without any institutional or commercial assistance) to ensure that at least a snapshot of the 90s internet is maintained for the future. 

This preservation has been attempted not just through the Internet Archive, but more curated projects like the online Web Design Museum, providing fully-functional captures of, as their website states, “over 2,000 carefully selected and sorted web sites that show web design trends between the years 1991 and 2006.” The Web Design Museum features archives of digital art collectives, design firms, promotions for music and film, massive companies, and early versions of current social media and e-commerce sites – an invaluable record of the design trends and aesthetics of the early internet. However, the bulk of the websites remaining broken or lost despite these efforts are what truly made the early internet special – decentralized, amateur webpages which gave the early internet its communal, optimistic quality. That mid-1990s explosion was one of the first times in history where self-expression on a worldwide scale became accessible to the general public, and this early promise of an internet driven by the creativity of its users, not one controlled by massive platforms with the intent of harvesting data for profit, is what truly delineates this era of online culture from what followed – and what makes it necessary to preserve if we ever hope to escape from platform capitalism.

Some of the largest swaths of lost online history were those sites in the middle of the transition between the early, open internet and one mediated through corporate platforms – ones which have now gone extinct, either from the bursting of the Dot-com Bubble in the early 2000s, or simply from their obsolescence. One of the most prominent examples of this is Geocities, once one of the foundations of internet infrastructure, before its shutdown in 2009 and the resulting mass extinction of many of its sites and pages. Geocities’ shutdown is a cautionary presage to a future where our current dominant platforms are overtaken by new ones, or when our current tech bubble inevitably bursts – and perhaps Facebook, Google, or Twitter may share the same fate as Geocities, with an even more massive loss of our modern history resulting from their deletion. While the internet seems to be, and is popularly thought of as, a place where everything is eternal, the loss of so much of its early history shows just how fickle its infrastructure is to any important link of its supply chain being broken or even altered. While it remains to be seen if our modern internet structure will end up being more future-proof than previous ones, as proven by Geocities, these platforms are only sustainable as long as their model remains profitable and useful to the individuals at the top of their respective food chains. The steady integration of cloud technologies into the most prominent internet platforms also adds another layer of uncertainty, leaving all of that data solely in the hands of companies’ own server infrastructure, which can be completely shut down at any time.

Much of the focus within the current community of internet preservationists is centered around the emulation or recreation of old web/browser-based software, often through offline means. Flash, for example, has received a massive amount of attention when it comes to preservation – and for good reason, essentially all interactive internet media was based around the software until HTML began to catch up in the early 2010s. With its discontinuation in 2020, a massive amount of internet art, games, animation, and more had been rendered inaccessible. While Adobe seemed to have no interest in creating tools for the preservation of Flash software, community members have created offline emulators for Flash files, meaning much of that history remains preserved. However, this only includes pages where files have been able to be ripped from their home websites, leaving any without an offline record on someone’s computer lost permanently. While the internet has been presented as a place where all data can be stored and preserved, ironically, the continued existence of its own historical record depends on the ability for its content to be stripped away from it, and into more “permanent” mediums (if files on one’s computer can be considered more permanent than those within the ether of the internet).

In Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka’s description of Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media within their introduction to Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, they describe Manovich’s 2001 text as pointing out “continuities between early avant-garde and animation film practices and the emerging digital culture, based on numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding […] The focus on new media changes the historical meaning and context of cinema from narrative cinema to one flexible enough to lend itself to interactivity, navigability, and digital representation and transmission.” Ironically, the internet’s development has slowly forced away that flexible nature of digital art, at least within the confines of modern internet browsing, with web activity being trafficked away from individual websites and towards massive, inherently restrictive platforms which have significantly lowered the barrier of entry for online self-expression, but in turn have severely hindered and sometimes eradicated the mixed-media freedom of which the early internet burst at the seams, forcing artists to build their work around the artificial, arbitrary boundaries of these platforms. 

Preservation of the early internet remains vital because it is one of the few ways to imagine a better future for our relationship to online space. The internet was not envisioned as yet another engine for capital, but as a truly socialist institution – a complete democratization of information, a new paradigm for how we imagined the collective process of history and art, a way to fully bridge class, racial and geographical divides in culture and perspective. As the massive profits that could be reaped from the internet were discovered, this utopian vision still struggled to hold on, with even our current monolithic arbiter of online interaction, Google, attempting an ambitious, decade-spanning project to scan and freely distribute every book that had ever been written – before capital stepped in, and “On March 22 of that year […] the legal agreement that would have unlocked a century’s worth of books and peppered the country with access terminals to a universal library was rejected under Rule 23(e)(2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York,” as detailed in James Somers’ 2017 piece for The Atlantic, Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria. However, this metaphor for that legendarily lost Roman library extends past this attempt at a “universal library” from a corporation for which such a project would seem utterly alien today, but to the internet in its entirety. The World Wide Web, as it is currently constructed, is the Library of Alexandria – except instead of all of its contents being set ablaze at once, the fire slowly, but endlessly erases the oldest, most neglected books it can find.

Perhaps the most promising form of early internet archaeology is not the preservation of the early web itself at all, but the preservation of its style, and its promise. Though certainly in part stemming from our larger cultural obsession with nostalgia which has manifested itself through global capitalism, current digital art proudly carrying forward with loving accuracy the oddities of the early internet’s aesthetic forward to today, both paying tribute to and deconstructing the old web’s aesthetic, and building something new from it. Artists such as Olia Lialina, with her work hosted on her proudly Geocities-inspired website, deal directly with the decay of the early internet as their subject matter, as well as conducting internet archaeology of their own, which can show the value in semi-lost early sites, despite and perhaps because of their broken and incomplete nature, recontextualizing them to say something about the loss of our online history. One such piece which exemplifies this is Lialina’s 2019 video Died in Your Arms Tonight (Shell’s Place Page 29), a documentation of the broken, hollowed-out state of a user’s Geocities passion project, once taking advantage of many of the early internet’s eccentricities, now reduced to a cascade of broken image files, which take on a life of their own with a haunting power. Even if much of the early internet history we have remaining is irreparably changed from their original, intended forms – perhaps there is some value to that on its own, as well. Maybe future internet archaeologists will look at a decrepit, abandoned YouTube or Facebook the same way, left with only scant titles or comments to piece together a vague approximation of the history that once inhabited the website – and perhaps that may take on a life of its own as well.

If we, collectively, ever wish to build an internet that fulfills its earliest promises, that open and democratized font of information and expression it was built to be, instead of its current form as a machine tasked with nothing but the extraction of data and capital – we must preserve its archaic, vibrant past. A past which truly brought, for the first time in centuries, expression freed from the constraints of the profit motive. Only through analyzing, maintaining, and building upon this legacy, either through the direct preservation of that history, or by carrying forward the ideas baked into the early web, which run counter to its current state, can a path away from our endless ouroboros of data capitalism possibly be found. Even if these digital digs for media fossils, just as with physical archaeology, uncover only partial remnants of their true selves – those bones of our early online culture have value. They trace the lineage and the path forward towards the internet of today, and a promise of a path left untaken – a promise which one day, a new internet, one connected to its past instead of relentlessly shedding it, may finally fulfill.

Bibliography:

1. Davis, Douglas. “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction (An Evolving Thesis: 1991-1995).” Leonardo, vol. 28, no. 5, The MIT Press, 1995, pp. 381–86, https://doi.org/10.2307/1576221.
2. Dowling, Stephen. “Why There’s so Little Left of the Early Internet.” BBC, 2 Apr. 2019, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190401-why-theres-so-little-left-of-the-early-internet. Accessed 29 Nov. 2021.
3. Huhtamo, Erkki, and Jussi Parikka. “An Archaeology of Media Archaeology.” Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2011.
4. Somers, James. “Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria.” The Atlantic, 20 Apr. 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2021. 
5. Lialina, Olia. Olia Lialina’s Work (Former FIRST REAL NET ART GALLERY), http://art.teleportacia.org/#CenterOfTheUniverse. Accessed 2 Dec. 2021.
6. Lialina, Olia, director. Died in Your Arms Tonight (Shell’s Place Page 29). YouTube, 7 Nov. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsyWM3EALEw. Accessed 2 Dec. 2021.