English
Unfinished!
There has been the term "internet archaeology" flying around, to describe those (re-)discovering the old internet and potentially reliving their childhood.[1] Broadly analogised to be similar to conventional archaeology, it seeks to be about understanding of the beginnings of internet culture and developing an appreciation of it. However, the internet is far more similar to the object of geology: material earth.
Archaeology is "as a discipline is explicitly structured by time"[2], as what makes archaeology distinctive in studying human society is periodising and chronolising it. Traditional archaeology has often relied on one-dimensional chronologies, where the date served as an "universal index or scale according to which everything may be related and compared".[3] And such understandings shape popular understanding of archaeology still, where they are "time-travellers". However, the internet is fundamentally incompatible with such a venture: it is marked by a non-linear progression of time, as past and present are continually pressed together to create new narratives. This is established through three key aspects: 1) the continued disappearance of websites makes information be transmitted in part orally (38% of websites since 2014 no longer exist for example)[4], 2) reverse-searching the internet is very hard due to the internet growing by a rate of 252,000 websites per day [5] and 3) the ability to edit the past. To illustrate the third in a stark way, the forum Tantytown copied jokes of the forum Something Awful one-to-one, subsequent protests led to most of these copycat jokes being outright deleted. Our more subtly in how biographies are constantly edited, making any disentangling of Live Journal history impossible.
The consequence of this is that the chronological history of the internet is not particular relevant for itself, instead like geological layers they get mashed together and new narratives emerge repeatedly. Most users of 4chan now do not know the history of their website or if they assume they do, have false notions (such as 4chan being founded due to its founders being banned from Something Awful for a variety of reasons). Which is wrong. This happens at a constant rate for every online community and space, while the dead one quickly are forgotten entirely (such as the mass of forums and geocities that people used to regularly visit). This presentism of the internet as such is similar to geology, it is impenetrable and previous iterations constantly get meshed together, making any chronological account near impossible increasingly. Reza Negarestani illustrates this well in his work Cyclonopedia:
Research Reza Negarestani online:
Find an article entitled ‘John Carpenter’s The Thing: White war and hypercamouflage’, but the text has been replaced with this message: ‘This page is not available’; a piece with a similar title is in RN’s manuscript. Even though the post is not available, the comments are, the first comment from RN reads: ‘Identities are the plot holes of someone else’s curriculum vitae (course of life)’.
Ctheory, Hyperstition and Cold Me. I contact other contributors at the Hyperstition website who seem to have known RN for a relatively long time, but none of them have met RN or could offer much help. A contributor at Hyperstition asks if I know where Reza is because he has abruptly halted his regular contributions since June 18, suggesting to me that I contact RN’s Iranian friends. I look for his last article (again it says, ‘This page is temporarily unavailable’). Track a few blogs linked to on the Hyperstition website, apparently belonging to RN’s Iranian friends. Some of the people I contacted suggest that RN must be a fictional invention of Hyperstition, a term loosely defined as fictional quantities that make themselves real. A few people think RN might be another avatar of one of the contributors at Hyperstition website, and finally some took Reza at face value, believing that he would need to host his site outside of Iran to circumvent any internet laws that could cause problems for him (maybe that’s why he removed so many posts at Hyperstition).
Cold Me: apparently RN’s personal website, strangely hosted by a German server (‘nicht gefunden!’ upon entering a wrong URL), hosted by a German guy named B who signs himself ‘kraut-design’ and seems to be paranoid about discussing RN. He replies back, ‘Don’t make trouble for reza’.
Is Reza male or female? At first I thought female, but now I would like to believe that RN is male.[6]
Instead of being a study of the evolution of the internet from the beginning to increasing complexity, one should instead see studying the internet like observing the process of solid earth, composing and decomposing into new things. As consequence is that all internet history is functionally oral history, as the medium itself cannot be permanent. Like parchment, most of the internet expires after some time.[7] As consequence, knowledge is transferred in the form of myths being retold by modern wizards and shamans, as can be seen with the variety of "internet documentaries."
[1] For examples, see: https://www.wired.com/2013/04/websites-stuck-in-time/; https://techcrunch.com/2009/10/10/internet-archaeology-in-which-the-sordid-past-of-the-internet-is-preserved-forever/; https://digital-archaeology.org/geocities-where-many-of-us-lost-our-html-virginity/.
[2] Andrew Gardner, "The Times of Archaeology and Archaeologies of Time", 2001, p. 35
[3] Michael Shanks, Time and Archaeology, p. 119
[4] https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/
[5] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/software/website-statistics/
[6] Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Anomaly)
[7] https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/8/23713128/something-awful-imgur-download-caper-digital-preservation-photo-hosting