The Internet Is Being Erased

Mark Graham is the director of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, and Chris Freeland is the Internet Archive’s director of library services and one of the co-authors of the new report Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record. Their work focuses on preserving digital materials that might otherwise disappear. Graham and Freeland joined Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to discuss why the internet is not forever, how digital culture vanishes through deletion, paywalls, broken links, platform decay, and corporate control, and what can be done to preserve public access to our collective cultural record.