While it is widely known that Pompeii was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, only serious historians will recall that this catastrophic event took place on August 24, 79 AD. If you are curious what typical Pompeiians ate for breakfast that morning nearly 2000 years ago, there are a few conserved bits of papyrus that will yield that information. Through the preservation and study of centuries-old artifacts, we have retained insight into the lives of our early ancestors.

Information archival has changed a lot since the days of dusty old books and scraps of paper. As of 2024, there is an estimated 11.23 zettabytes (11.23 trillion gigabytes) of digital data stored worldwide. We have placed our trust in the cloud and the digital storage hardware it requires. (see Read This If You Can for more on the cloud). Post things on the Internet with care, we are told – once there they will live on forever.

Except that they don’t. Today there are over a billion websites, and a quarter of a million new ones are created every day. According to a study by the Pew Research Center, 38% of web pages that existed in 2013 are gone. Two-thirds of the links in web pages from the last 9 years lead to the frustrating “404” message. Researchers recently noted that half of all hyperlinks in Supreme Court opinions lead to content that is either missing or has changed since it was originally linked. Sophisticated search engines like ChatGPT-4 make the Internet ever more accessible, but with link rot increasing,  signs of Artificial Dementia are becoming apparent. <continue reading>