{"id":891840,"date":"2026-10-23T10:18:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-23T10:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/891840\/"},"modified":"2026-10-23T10:18:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-23T10:18:10","slug":"the-internet-promises-immortality-good-luck-with-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/891840\/","title":{"rendered":"The internet promises immortality. Good luck with that."},"content":{"rendered":"

Because I follow Stewart Brand \u2014 writer, futurist, cool cat \u2014 on social media, I saw this announcement:<\/a> \u201cAll my work online for a guaranteed 100 years. It\u2019s a new service being offered by WordPress. I think it\u2019s great.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true. For $38,000, WordPress is offering a stepped-down version of digital immortality, \u201cA FULL CENTURY<\/a> [their emphasis] ensuring that what you create today remains accessible for the future.\u201d Their plan includes LOCKSS \u2014 Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe \u2014 technology, which \u201cstores all of your data in at least three separately mirrored data centers to ensure access and redundancy in the event of failures or disasters.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the one hand it\u2019s great to see this homage to Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and woolgatherer extraordinaire.<\/p>\n

On the other hand \u2014 a website that lasts 100 years? Really? When best-selling books<\/a> by computer geniuses, such as \u201cIf Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies,\u201d are predicting the AI apocalypse in (checks watch) two or three years? <\/p>\n

Online critics dunking on WordPress have noted that domain names can be registered<\/a> for only 10 years, or, per one headline: \u201cThis assumes \u2026 the web \u2014 and humanity \u2014 will be around that long.\u201d<\/p>\n

Digital ephemera is the ultimate tautology. The domain name I created about a dozen years ago, alexbeam.net<\/a>, now lands you on the splash page of Freddy the Frogcaster. Preservationist James Reid-Cunningham<\/a> alerted me to a cryptic maxim making the rounds during the early days of pixellated preservation: \u201cDigital documents will last for five years or forever, whichever comes first.\u201d <\/p>\n

Translation: No one knows anything.<\/p>\n

For the moment, digital preservation is considerably less stable than storing physical books and manuscripts, explained Shira Peltzman, associate director of digital preservation strategy at Yale\u2019s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. With a rare book, she told me, \u201cyou can take something off the shelf and it won\u2019t be degraded. It\u2019s treated with a certain benign neglect. But with digital copies, there are so many different layers of dependencies: It isn\u2019t just the software that was used, but also the hardware and the operating system are factors in longevity.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur digital collections represent a constantly shifting window of technology,\u201d she elaborated. \u201cWe get floppy disks, now we are receiving email exports, or data that was created on mobile phones. In a digital environment change is a given.\u201d <\/p>\n

When I solicited her opinion on WordPress\u2019s ballyhooed 100-year website, she answered diplomatically: \u201cThat kind of risk mitigation is easier to accomplish at the institutional level than at the individual level. It\u2019s debatable whether that [hundred-year] claim would hold up with time and scrutiny.\u201d<\/p>\n

A curious paradox in the world of physical books is that older books last longer than modern ones. \u201cBooks used to be luxury objects that were made to last forever,\u201d Reid-Cunningham said. \u201cThe children and grandchildren were intended to use that atlas or dictionary. Now they are cheaper and more disposable \u2014 not necessarily a bad thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

I mentioned that a friend has a copy of Samuel Johnson\u2019s 1755 dictionary sitting on his library shelf, in excellent condition. \u201cYes, but it\u2019s probably not as solid as a book made in the 1500s or the 1300s,\u201d Reid-Cunningham said. \u201cSome early codices from the Middle Ages are in great condition.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Reid-Cunningham taught book preservation, he would say to students: \u201cWe are not actually preserving these books, so much as postponing their inevitable demise.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Library of America,<\/a> devoted to publishing authoritative texts of classic American literature, uses high-quality paper and special binding technology that it says<\/a> will \u201clast for centuries.\u201d The library\u2019s president, Max Rudin, admitted in an interview that the longevity claim \u201cmay be tempting fate, as we have only been in business for 50 years. I do predict that our books will outlive you and me.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the Poles say on birthdays: Sto lat! (A hundred years.) I hope Rudin and I will both live to be 100. And that our books last forever.<\/p>\n

Alex Beam is a contributing Globe Opinion writer. Follow him @imalexbeamyrnot<\/a>.<\/p>\n