In the mid-1990s, I was at art college when my supremely talented tutor, Paul Granjon, decided to show a few students this new thing called ‘the internet’. He plugged in his Mac and a modem. Plenty of screeching noises and a couple of minutes later, we were online. Which in those days meant you could type even a quite generic term into a search engine and get only a few dozen results. Paul then showed us the source code for a web page and, in a weird collision of nerdery and punk, insisted anyone could make one.
To me, this felt like sorcery – only attainable. It also seemed like a great way to get my art ideas out into the world, whether the world wanted them or not. Fortunately, by that point, I also owned my own Mac, which lurked in the corner of my room like a beige monstrosity. (This was pre-iMac.) I fired the thing up and careened down a rabbit hole during those evenings when beer wasn’t careening down my gullet. I taught myself rudimentary HTML. And I found somewhere to host my web page. Anyone really could make one.
Art attack
I kept faffing around with websites during my final couple of years at university, alongside preparing for a final live – and entirely unrehearsed – performance piece that would make up 95% of my grade. It would also, unwisely, involve half the tech in the department. This included a Mac with a hacked-together footpad that, when stomped on, triggered an interactive movie projected on a wall. Along with half a dozen TVs. And a pile of VHS decks. Then I left university, at which point I discovered there weren’t many job ads looking for “weird performance artist who is far too into tech”. But I could build websites.
Eventually, I fell into writing and publishing. But for a few years, I spent most of my working life building websites. Today, much of my time is spent writing for them, what with the terrifying decline in print media. And those two chunks of my life have something in common. The bulk of what I created over the years was transient. That first website? Gone. I don’t even have a backup of it. But also, countless articles vanished into the ether as sites closed and features were updated. The Wayback Machine was meant to solve all that.
Vanishing act
I use the Wayback Machine often. It’s an indispensable resource that gulps down as much of the internet as it can, as often as it can. In theory, you should be able to plug in any website and see how it looked in years past. It’s fantastic for research. Occasionally, it even helps me to unearth screenshots of ancient apps and long-discarded press releases that are vital for what I’m working on. The downside? It’s full of holes. My early web pages aren’t on there. But, far more importantly, nor are countless others.
According to Wired, this is only going to get worse. Although writers, researchers, academics and curious parties worldwide use the Wayback Machine like I do, publishers and other outlets increasingly block its archiving efforts. From a copyright perspective, I get it. And Wayback Machine project owner The Internet Archive has sailed far too close to the wind elsewhere on several occasions, blazing beyond notions of fair use. But with digital media and output being so ephemeral, we’re creating a future in which history will be lost and forgotten. It’s like what’s happening with old games but for the entire internet.
In years to come, there won’t be stacks of paper archives to digitise and pore over. There’ll just be… nothing.
