Recently, I've been made acutely aware of memory loss, not just in my personal life, but also on the internet. I have had a hand in keeping websites alive when large entities such as WordPress kicked feminist blogs off their servers without warning, and I still have all of their posts and content stored on my home disks. Meanwhile, the internet has eventually succeeded in erasing their existence.
One of the websites that vanished into the digital ether was 8tracks.com, a place that witnessed how my now husband and I were courting each other with mixtapes while we were long-distance dating. The mix-tape record showed mixes that were hot, flirty, both of us trying to impress each other (and succeeding). Every step along the wooing way, until the eventual proposal hints began dropping like lead balloons.
8tracks helped us along the way, with the limitations that it posed - eight songs, never the same band, and be accurate with the credits. When the big music corps came to crush this poor little startup, my husband was one of the fans who chipped in a thousand dollars in "stock" just to keep the place alive.
It stayed alive for another couple of years, trying to keep afloat on odd ad revenue from youtube and web ads, while clearing out the music that us fans had actually uploaded to the servers to save themselves from litigation and to have to pay for storage.
Every playlist that I made for him eventually became a pale copy of itself, downgraded to the digital degradation where everything goes to die online before it gets deleted.
At some point in the offspring's life, I tried to explain this musical cross-Atlantic flirting we had going on, and her reaction was very appropriate; she ran away with the speed of a bee on cocaine screaming "EEWWWW GROSS" because she arrived via a stork delivery, of course. Can't really blame her, while my playlist titles were subtle and always included "Mr Brown", his were decidedly less subtle and went from "Let's have Stax, Dabitch" to "Headboard shaking" in a matter of days.
It wasn't the same to listen to anymore, either way. The songs that we had uploaded were no longer there, they had been replaced with other songs that existed on youtube - and often these were not the same ones.
I had painstakingly made mp3's of my own collected vinyl, B-sides of rare pressings, I had also bought directly from DJs and bands who had created their own remixes of songs. I guarded my music so carefully that I abandoned iTunes and iPhone early so that I would have better control over where I could store my music on my drives, and not have Apple replace songs - which it is still doing by the way. Buying music from Google itself isn't a much better deal, what happens when you die, or you lose your account?
Your children can't inherit your digital data like they could inherit your vinyl collection. They can't look at your photos like they could flick through your photo albums.
And with how all search engines are adding AI to search now, people are no longer visiting websites at all.
The websites that are writing new information, adding new data, uploading new music, making new connections, are being scraped by AI and shorthand outputted as quick answers to someone's question on the other end. Humans taking note, processing ideas, connecting information, collecting music, art, history, stories, writing, producing, interviewing and cataloging are not getting anything whilst people are feeding tokens into bots for questions that really could have been solved by a simple grep.
The end user of the information that the search engine passes on, never visits the website that produced it. The website gets nothing more than perhaps a citation. It won't take FAANG long to figure out some way to charge us for using our own information, the same way that they're charging us for seeing our own photos, and listening to our own music.
They're charging us for access to our memories.
On the right, when the playlists focused on "Miss Brown" as she started highschool.
I'd link some external hard drives as a reminder that you need to get off the damn cloud which is just someone else's hard drive, but prices always change, so search for good deals near you. Never had issues with Western Digital personally so I'd give those a go, the portable ones are nice and stack neatly plus you can paint them with Posco markers so you know what is on each one. 😄
