The Digital World Is Rotting

I’m coming out of my hiatus to talk about this because I have a lot to say about this topic. I was reading on HN today about a forum becoming injected with AI slop. This forum was from the time before the sheer noise of the modern internet, before it was profitable to have a voice on the Internet. People asking and answering questions about the physics problems they were dealing with. The man who founded the forum, Greg Bernhadt decides to retroactively fit in AI generated posts and answers, under the name OF REAL PEOPLE. Read the article to get the entire story, but this enraged me.

There’s a sanctity to such places because they’re so far and few in between, and it got me thinking about the larger effect of the bizarrely precarious state of the Internet. We have logged so much history about ourselves. A rich beautiful repository of knowledge, art and real lived-in experience at our fingertips and accessible at a moment’s notice. I can watch YouTube videos about someone halfway across the world, if I’m lucky I can even find videos where there’s no falsification and genuine authenticity bleeds out of the screen. I can learn their language if I wanted to.

And yet… it’s so fragile. Hard drives break all the time. Companies change hands. Lawsuits happen. Glitches in systems can cripple entire infrastructures around this rich history.

How do we reconcile with that?

Every day passes, with more and more links dying every day. Vast repositories of knowledge are at risk constantly by being tampered with or being completely wiped out.

Every single day, Alexandria burns.