The world’s digital memory is at risk 

A CONSTANT hum drones out of a former church in San Francisco. It is the sound, from hundreds of fans cooling hundreds of computer servers, of the digital past being kept alive. This is the Internet Archive, the largest collection of archived web pages in the world and a constant reminder of the fragility of our digital past. It is also (thanks to a March ruling in a federal court, which found that the archive’s lending practices violate publishers’ rights) just one battlefield in a growing struggle that will define how humanity’s collective digital memory is owned, shared and preserved – or lost forever.

As a scholar of digital data, I know that not all data loss – the corrosion and destruction of our digital past – is tragic. But much data loss today occurs in ways that are deeply unjust and that have monumental implications for both culture and politics. Few nonprofit organisations or publicly backed digital libraries are able to operate at the scale needed to truly democratise control of digital knowledge. Which means important decisions about how these issues play out are left to powerful, profit-driven corporations or political leaders with agendas. Understanding these forces is a critical step toward managing, mitigating and ultimately controlling data loss and, with it, the conditions under which our societies remember and forget.

From streaming platforms removing digital-only shows from their libraries to governments defunding their national library systems to the effects of tech centralisation, data is disappearing at alarming rates. Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive’s founder, told me that thanks to government pressure or simply error, data is often subject to large-scale erasure. For web pages that have been wiped clean, the Internet Archive is often the only place to look.