What’s more alive—library stacks or the internet? Seems plain as day: The living one clamors and bleats. The one that’s dark and smells of mildew is dead.
But it hasn’t always been obvious. At the turn of the century, when the web was a wake for victims of dotcom crib death—Pets.com, eToys.com, gazoontite.com—it was a morbid place to be.
Occasionally it could seem alive, sure, as brush fires are alive. Bright, but not long for this world. No one knew if even Amazon and Priceline would survive, and they almost didn’t.
Grooved into the nervous systems of anyone who came of age in the ’80s and ’90s was also a persistent fear of disappearing data. “Computers” were identified with caprice. Everyone knew the ice-blood dread of having whole term papers disappear from MacWrite or Word. (You were cautioned not just to back up but to print, at every juncture.) Then came the hard lesson of the century’s end: Economies could vanish too. The crash of the dotcom market reinforced the impression that the internet was itself a soap bubble.
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Into this existential panic came the Wayback Machine, launched weeks after 9/11 by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit labor of love built by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat. That fall, both the nation and the internet seemed to hang in the balance. By putting nonmaterial culture on digital tape, as was the founders’ original intention, the archive might lend immortality to internet ephemera. Kahle and Gilliat thus made sure that “I Can Has Cheezburger?” “HelloMyFutureGirlfriend” and “All Your Base Are Belong to Us”—which seemed like fleeting hallucinations—would outlive us and delight humankind forever.
The archive further ladled nostalgia on nostalgia by cribbing the Wayback Machine’s moniker from the Rocky and Bullwinkle shows. Even as they had made millions creating and selling businesses, including the Alexa Internet, Kahle and Gilliat were communitarians, and they ran the Machine on open source Linux nodes. Today it still preserves cached web pages in various iterations (now that takes a high level of crawling tech, as well as internet piety).
The Machine’s holdings blow the mind: more than 20 petabytes of data. By some estimates, the entire written works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, add up to 50 petabytes. The Machine abandoned digital tape storage in 2006, but on its site you can still find treasures from GeoCities entries to forgotten role-playing games, including Abandoned Places: A Time for Heroes. And who doesn’t love the dancing hamsters that went viral after they appeared on the website of a Canadian art student?
It’s astounding to think that in 2001, the web’s notions and fancies were already being frozen in amber. But what the Machine truly preserves is the sentiment felt at a crux in the internet’s development—the end of the beginning. This thing of ours, which seems so permanent now, was frail and unsteady. Everyone knew the substrate was nothing but digital drywall and rusted siding. The Wayback Machine would remember the web at its best.
My favorite response to the Wayback Machine at its launch came from Kendra Mayfield, in WIRED: “Imagine being able to travel back in time to an era when the digital publishing euphoria had just begun and the dotcom boom was in full swing.”
An era! It had been eight years!
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Today the Wayback Machine looks weathered, dated, especially the Rocky and Bullwinkle kitsch. Sometimes cached pages won’t load; its UX, though recently redesigned, is as idiosyncratic as the early web. But it is still a favorite warm-woolen-mittens place in the thunderdome. Still staffed up, still on the job, the Machine is a monument to the idealism of that bolshevik dawn, when information longed for freedom (ha) and when that freedom, in turn, was believed to be the royal road to human liberation (sob).
On a whim I looked up my name on the Wayback Machine not long ago. I was hoping to find stuff I’d written for web zines in the ’90s, including Stim.com, a slightly gonzo site owned by Prodigy, a now defunct tech company. But I found almost nothing from before 2006. I skimmed one 2006 article, which was neither incriminating nor interesting, and I tried to remember writing it. Nothing. From the start, writing for the web has had a place between writing and talking; it’s almost as easy to forget a blog post as it is to forget a conversation.
For at least a century, the proof of the inferiority of newspapers to books was that newspapers were ephemeral. Books had moral heft and actual heft—thick paper, heavy binding, hardwood housing. They enjoyed eternal life. By contrast, a newspaper—cheap pulp printed with the day’s news—began to rot almost the second it saw daylight. A day-old newspaper had its most promising chance at life extension as a wrap for deep-fried haddock.
Now it’s books that seem to be denied a full life. Entombed, the out-of-print ones go unconsulted, as nothing outside the internet must be thought to exist. Online it is digital artifacts that are said to last forever. The YouTube noodling, pamphlets, quips—it seems we couldn’t compost this universe of nonsense if we tried.
If I’m honest, I started out, a long time ago, wanting permanence from the internet—a place to show up and inscribe my name in the Book of Life. But that desire is gone. Now there are far, far too many Vines and tweets and afterthought photos. And if this stuff seems permanent, it’s not. Even if the FBI can disinter some of our old digital contraptions, things break and decay on the internet in unexpected ways.
The Wayback Machine is perpetually finding new uses. Last year, the directory for the Office of Refugee Resettlement suddenly vanished—but the Machine had the original handy. Its founders, like all founders, plan for it never to break, but that’s a tall order. The Roman Library of Celsus in Turkey, among the most impressive in the ancient world and built to last, fell into desuetude after less than 200 years. The internet empire is much more vast and populous than ancient Rome, but will it be more permanent? The Wayback Machine keeps betting yes—that, against all odds, the web can be programmed to prevent its own collapse. Our web will remember itself, the Wayback Machine keeps insisting—and, what’s more, remember itself fondly.
Virginia Heffernan (@page88) has been a regular contributor since 2017.
This article appears in the October issue. Subscribe now.
MORE FROM WIRED@25: 2013-2018
- Editor's Letter: Tech has turned the world upside down. Who will shake up the next 25 years?
- Edward Snowden and Malkia Cyril: Turnkey tyranny
- Satya Nadella and Jenny Lay-Flurrie: Mindful tech
- Susan Wojcicki and Geetha Murali: Getting girls into tech
- Jennifer Doudna and Jiwoo Lee: Taming Crispr
- Sundar Pichai and R. Kim: Every eye tells a story
Join us for a four-day celebration of our anniversary in San Francisco, October 12–15. From a robot petting zoo to provocative onstage conversations, you won't want to miss it. More information at www.Wired.com/25.
