Business Daily – "The Internet’s Memory Problem"

Date: March 12, 2025
Host: Frey Lindsay
Guests/Contributors: Danny, Cory Doctorow, Aaron Smith, Anusha Hossain, Zynga, Onur, Christina

Overview

This episode of Business Daily delves into “the internet’s memory problem”: the widespread and accelerating loss of digital memories, documents, and cultural artifacts. Host Frey Lindsay, alongside guests ranging from tech researchers to journalists and everyday internet users, investigates why so much of our personal and shared history is vanishing, focusing on what’s known as “link rot” (dead or disappearing links) and the challenges of digital archiving.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Personal Stories – The Loss of Digital Keepsakes

• Lost Mixtapes & Personal Archives
  • Frey and his friend Danny recount losing a unique mixtape CD, using it as a metaphor for personal digital losses which, once online, can be easily lost forever.
  • Frey Lindsay: “We've all got a story like this, right? …These things are like little markers of who we used to be and they lead us to who we are now.” [02:23]
• A Spanish Social Network Gone
  • Olivia (pseudonym for Anusha Hossain) tells how she lost years of photos and writings when the social network Twenti shut down.
  • Zynga: “But it wasn't my Gmail that I was actually checking. It was a Hotmail account. I lost several years of photos and writings and friendships.” [03:49]

2. The Scale and Reality of Link Rot

• Research on Disappearing Web Content
  • Aaron Smith (Pew Research Center) explains “link rot” and shares alarming statistics:
    • 25% of almost 1 million URLs from 2013–2023 are now inaccessible.
    • For URLs from 2013 alone, 38% are gone.
    • 1 in 5 government/news websites have at least one broken link; 5% have all links broken.
    • 1 in 5 tweets disappear just months after posting.
    • Aaron Smith: “A quarter of those pages no longer resolve to a functioning website.” [04:47]
• Wikipedia & Broad Impact
  • Frey discovers that about 30% of links in Wikipedia reference sections are dead, even on major topics like Fela Kuti, Angela Merkel, happiness, or the Boeing 747.
  • Some of these can be found only via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

3. The Challenge of Preservation

• Physical vs. Digital Storage
  • Digital materials are stored on servers requiring maintenance. When companies go bust, change strategy, or do migrations poorly, digital materials disappear.
• The Role of the Internet Archive
  • The Internet Archive, via its Wayback Machine, has saved over 835 billion web pages, but still cannot keep pace with web decay—especially as newer content moves behind social media “walled gardens.”
  • Frey Lindsay: “But even with astonishing numbers like that, we're still seeing linkrot encroaching at a regular pace, taking away large parts of our cultural and even political memory with it.” [07:22]
• Obstacles for Researchers & Regional Content
  • Historian Anusha Hossain describes difficulty accessing historical conversations and debates about South Asian writing systems, as much of that content is now lost:
    • Anusha Hossain: “The Silicon Valley stuff is really well preserved. But when I try to get the other … piece of the transnational debate, it's much harder to find pieces of the Bengali Internet.” [10:02]
  • She and other historians often rely heavily on the Wayback Machine for any hope of recovering lost material.

4. Journalism and the Vanishing Record

• Journalists’ Work Disappearing

  • Zynga, a French journalist, recounts shock at losing access to published digital work when outlets closed or stopped maintaining their websites:
    • Zynga: “I was genuinely surprised. It seemed directly counter to the Internet's biggest promise.” [12:14]
  • Even broadcast programs like this episode may eventually disappear, with only the current listener experiencing them.

• Grantland: An Exception

  • Katie Baker (Danny’s pseudonymous interview) describes her relief when Grantland (archived by ESPN) remained accessible, though she still feels anxious it may vanish:
    • Danny/Katie Baker: “I always have a moment of nerves where I think that maybe this time I'm going to go and it's going to be gone. And I'm always so relieved when it's still there.” [13:54]

5. Legal and Commercial Obstacles to Archiving

• Copyright Lawsuits Threaten Archives
  • Cory Doctorow explains how organizations like the Internet Archive risk lawsuits from publishers and record labels that equate preservation with piracy:
    • Cory Doctorow: “...publishers and record labels have brought an existentially threatening lawsuit against the Internet Archive … two lawsuits that could erase that archive at the stroke of a pen and … salt the earth so that nobody ever tries to do what they've done before.” [14:45]

6. Bigger Picture: The Role of Capitalism and Monopolies

• From Diversity to Control
  • Doctorow traces a shift from the internet’s early pluralism to today’s monopolistic power:
    • Cory Doctorow: “What one was not capitalism, but monopolism, where we created a system that more or less explicitly encouraged the formation of monopolies who … earn their money by owning things that other people needed… What happened on the internet is what happened everywhere. We let the landlords win.” [16:33]

7. Does Anyone Care About the ‘Trivial’ Internet?

• Why Everyday Content Matters
  • Doctorow and Hossain argue that the tiny details and everyday conversations of the internet are irreplaceable pieces of social history:
    • Cory Doctorow: “The trivial is where it's at. …The Rosetta Stone is not a work of high art, right? It's an invoice … the ability to preserve the mundane and the trivial pays dividends that we will never understand until, in retrospect, we recover them.” [17:34]
    • Anusha Hossain: “It's very important to also understand how different generations were communicating with each other. So I do kind of fear that we'll lose that…” [18:17]

8. Human Impact: Grieving Lost Connections

• Final Listener Story
  • Christina, from Germany, laments the loss of a teenage chat website holding memories of a now-deceased friend:
    • Christina: “…a friend of mine died in high school and there are loads and loads of messages and pictures and it would just be really nice to go back to them. And obviously as teenagers, we didn't … kind of understand the Internet that much and we thought it's on our computers, so it's there forever.” [18:47]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “These things are like little markers of who we used to be and they lead us to who we are now.” — Frey Lindsay [02:23]
• “A quarter of those pages no longer resolve to a functioning website.” — Aaron Smith [04:47]
• “The trivial is where it’s at… The Rosetta Stone is not a work of high art, right? It’s an invoice.” — Cory Doctorow [17:34]
• “It seemed directly counter to the Internet’s biggest promise.” — Zynga [12:14]
• “We let the landlords win.” — Cory Doctorow [16:33]
• “…we thought it's on our computers, so it's there forever.” — Christina [19:06]

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Intro & Lost Mixtape Story: 01:08–02:23
• Technical Explanation of Link Rot (Aaron Smith): 04:29–05:50
• Wikipedia Link Rot Demo: 05:50–07:22
• Internet Archive’s Limitations: 07:22–08:46
• Censorship & Disappearing News Archives in Turkey (Onur): 08:53–09:46
• Challenges for Internet Historians (Anusha Hossain): 09:54–11:35
• From Open Web to “Walled Gardens”: 11:35–12:14
• Journalists Losing Access to Their Work: 12:14–12:58
• Rarity of Preserved Archives (Grantland/Katie Baker): 13:30–14:20
• Threats from Copyright Lawsuits (Cory Doctorow): 14:45–16:01
• Shifts from Open Web to Monopolies: 16:01–17:10
• Importance of Preserving the “Trivial”: 17:34–18:17
• Listener’s Lost Memories (Christina): 18:47–19:29

Conclusion

This episode highlights the fragility of digital memory in an online world dominated by profit-driven companies and legal battles over ownership. As link rot accelerates, large swathes of culture—from everyday conversations to journalism—risk vanishing forever. While initiatives like the Internet Archive provide a lifeline, they remain embattled and incomplete. The loss isn’t just technical—it is deeply personal, historical, and cultural, underlining that trivial digital traces may prove, in the long run, most valuable of all.