Thanks to Chris Coyler for spotlighting the Internet Archive’s new book Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (available in print and as a free e-book). Going right to the top of my to-read list.

Chris reflects on the report’s findings about how many websites have and have not been preserved by the Wayback Machine, and the ethics of letting websites “go dark” rather than “static-izing a site and putting it somewhere inexpensive to live as a viewable time capsule”.

It’s a good question, and one I wrestle with a lot, both as a history lover who understands the value of preservation and as a person who is and has been responsible for the fates of various websites. I don’t plan on ever retiring from this website, but if I do a static-ized approach paired with a Wayback Machine snapshot and offline duplicate would probably be its ideal fate.

And yet, I totally understand the impulse to just totally nuke a site. There is a weight to managing them that’s partly financial but mostly psychological. When you’re in the midst of it, you have enough energy to shoulder it. But over time, that weight can turn into a burden as you slowly (or quickly) accumulate more to deal with in life, and just casting it off can sometimes be the best decision. In the words of preeminent philosopher Kenny Rogers, “you got to know when to hold ‘em / know when to fold ‘em”.

Perhaps this is a controversial opinion, but you can’t—and shouldn’t—preserve everything. I wrote about this back in 2013 in response to an article arguing for the right to be forgotten and the ethics of being able to delete digital memories or other assets. No matter the medium humans have used for communication over millennia—oral, cuneiform, paper, electronic—most of it doesn’t survive. We can mourn that loss for all of the illuminating history it would have contained; we can also acknowledge that’s just how it goes. Memento mori.