The Internet is Forever Except When We Want It to Be
And what to do about it
The much-memed saying “the internet is forever” means that anything posted online is immediately out of our control. It can be manually screenshotted and dispersed or saved for later use – which influencers these days call ‘receipts’. It can also be scraped, which means data online is collected by bots and web crawlers to be stored elsewhere, indefinitely.
The internet is not a library, or a museum. It is a surveillance machine that no-one can control.
And yet I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen a creator’s professional online presence wiped out irretrievably, with some losing more than a decade of archives of their work. Websites can crash or close down. Social media accounts can be deleted for no given reason. Cloud storage users can be randomly locked out for months, for obscure reasons.