impermanence

artwork: ben sisto

It’s amazing how in this day in age things can disappear just as quickly as they appear. Paralleling concerns about the so-called wikipedization of the internet, it’s clear at this point that the information upon which we rely can be changed at the drop of a hat. Unfortunately, though, unlike Wikipedia itself, there is no edit history for the internet as a whole. This potentially dangerous attribute, dubbed by some as the “memory hole,” enabled the modification of Bush administration press releases months after the fact — oh we’ve just made a minor change to say that “major combat operations” have ended in Iraq, not merely “combat operations“. We hope you don’t notice that we’re rewriting history. But wait, I think we forgot about the Internet Archive’s wayback machine.

I was recently reminded of the utterly transient nature of the internet when attempting to visit a site I loved that documented songs sampled by Daft Punk and other French house groups, with clips of the sampled and sampling tracks side by side. (Hearing all of the the strikingly similar samples on the site, by the way, blew me away in that in one sense, it took away part of the genius and mystery behind Daft Punk, but in another, it only added to it because of their ability to appropriate so much so well.) So anyway, when I tried to go back to the site, I was greeted instead with a 404 error. Gone. Deleted. And while archive.org did have snapshots of the pages themselves, they didn’t cache the oh-so-wonderful sample collection that really made the site what it was. Lesson reiterated. As easily as information can be created, it can be changed or destroyed, relegated to the digital abyss.

Sound familiar?

Edwin Birdsong - Cola Bottle Baby

George Duke - I Love You More