Obvious bullshit is obvious, but i don’t have time to track down the source of this. They say every conspiracy theory starts with a grain of truth, but of course it doesn’t have too!
Anyone know what three libs are talking about here? A misunderstanding or just a lie?
This is happening on every part of the internet. A lot of old content is disappearing for a variety of reasons. I’m guessing that this is one of those things where they take a phenomenon that is not unique to China and explain how it’s bad when it happens in China because China bad.
After thinking about it for a while, not having any special knowledge, but being in the tech field, I feel like this is the most likely scenario.
In the States, where can you find old stuff from the 90s anymore? That was before I was using the internet heavily, but things like GeoCities and other meta websites have gone down or basically only exist in archives now.
I realize that the article never said that China is purposefully pulling these websites down just that they seem to be disappearing. This is conspiracy theory code for we’re just asking questions. But if I had heard an American say, hey, why are these old 90s websites coming down? Isn’t that suspicious? Isn’t our government being totalitarian? I would definitely just say no, that’s just how the internet really works, Things come down, nothing lasts forever.
While this is true, I think a lot of people are surprised that this is the case. For a while, I think there was a sense that the internet was essentially a permanent record, with storage and bandwidth always getting cheaper and bigger, but the reality is that cheaper and bigger doesn’t mean free or unlimited, and so there would inevitably be a point where you couldn’t just store everything and have it available forever. It makes sense once you think about it, but then the question becomes about what gets saved vs what disappears, and why. That’s where there’s fertile ground for conspiracy theories and speculation.
There’s also a really interesting conversation to be had about what we ought to expect in terms of what data and content we do want to archive long-term, and then what kind of infrastructure is required to maintain that. This article is less illustrative of what China is or isn’t doing and more of the issue that we don’t have a clear set of parameters or any long-term precedent for digital content storage, which is exacerbated by the fact that most of the infrastructure is privately owned. Those owners have no real obligation to archive anything except to the extent that it maximizes their profits or shareholder value, which isn’t a great way to decide what does and doesn’t make it into the ‘record’ so to speak. Somewhere along the line, there will be a need and a demand for a more robust public effort to curate and archive internet content.