Internet is not eternal: memory as a challenge, the curator as hope

The risks of losing memory and experiencing more frequent Mandela effects are just a click away.

Digital archives have become a major topic for our societies. At the crossroads of law, intellectual property, politics, technology, and intimacy, the intricacies are complex. However, there is only one certainty: the memory of the web is anything but stable, permanent, eternal, or sacred.

Recent examples abound: in the United States, the Museum of Classic Chicago Television, whose mission is to promote the preservation of Chicago television programs or advertisements, was threatened by a Sony contractor over copyright issues. The project, which has been operating since 2007, is led by individuals from the television industry who are determined to convey the spirit of an era and organize the traces of local culture.

Last April, Imgur—a platform widely used to upload images later shared on numerous forums and social networks—announced the removal of content deemed obsolete or #NSFW. As often happens, what seems commendable—to clean a platform of illicit or immoral content—turns out to be much more problematic in practice. The criteria remain unclear due to a lack of clear governance and do not take into account the sometimes substantial work of contributors.

Proof that even YouTube's tools can be misused. The Jose Teran case is illustrative: the accused claimed to own or control over 50,000 songs, including some recorded by Daddy Yankee or even Julio Iglesias! Under the name MediaMuv, Jose Teran and his partner Batista Fernandez signed a contract with YouTube to use its Content Management System (CMS), which rights holders use to claim copyright ownership and resulting royalties.

The purge, a demonstration of the fragility of online content.

Platforms often resort to a "purge," a technique as old as computers.

In essence, it is a radical decision, as in the case of Imgur, where the company decides to change its terms of service to suddenly remove accounts, content, or data deemed obsolete or now illegal. Google did the same in May 2023, imposing that accounts (personal) inactive for more than 2 years would be deleted, including the Drive storage tool and the well-known Google Photos. The blog post also recommends always having a "backup plan" just in case... On the X side, Elon Musk has used purges multiple times, such as to remove links to his competitor Mastodon: the purge is a unilateral privilege, a political act that demonstrates the fragility of what we publish online when we use private services, and our reluctance to archive or save this content. And it can lead to personal tragedies. The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz asks, "Are our online memories threatened?" regarding Facebook accounts deleted overnight that were an anchor and memory point for families.

The curator, this useful and nuanced author.

For the Journal du Luxe, I mentioned initiatives that try to save online memory: the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization dedicated to archiving the web, tries with its famous Wayback machine to take snapshots of websites. Nevertheless, the volume increases by 20 terabytes per month (!), and many links are broken or truncated. In France, the BnF has taken on the mission of ensuring the legal deposit of the French internet, with archives accessible to any accredited researcher. And new web backup projects are created every day.

The curator could be a remedy for the risk of internet amnesia, to give meaning, narrative, and perspective to the billions of signals. A subject that echoes Phaedrus, Plato's dialogue. Especially an exchange between Theuth, the Egyptian god, inventor, and Thamus, the king of the Egyptian city of Thebes, who reminds him that the invention of writing is not always a guarantee of collective improvement without political intervention.

"O Theuth, the greatest master of arts, one is the one who can generate an art, another is the one who can judge what is the lot of damage and usefulness for those who must use it. And now you, who are the father of writing, attribute to it, out of complaisance, a power that is the opposite of what it possesses. Indeed, this art will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it because they will stop exercising their memory: putting their trust in writing, it is from outside, thanks to foreign imprints, and not from within, thanks to themselves, that they will perform the act of remembrance (...). Therefore, when thanks to you, they will have heard about many things without having received any teaching, they will seem to have much knowledge, while, in most cases, they will have no knowledge; moreover, they will be unbearable in their dealings because they will have become semblances of wise men, instead of being wise."

This role is all the more important as Wilma Bainbridge, Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago, warns against the "Mandela Effect," a memory phenomenon where everyone seems to have incorrect memories of common popular icons.

It is named in reference to the fact that many people thought Nelson Mandela had died in detention. And it is gaining popularity on the Internet, on sites like Reddit and TikTok. And even if for many people, it's a little fun game they can play, I realized that it's actually a very interesting effect of human memory that had not been experimentally studied before.

Wilma Bainbridge

A real danger for democracies as we develop parasocial relationships, and as the plasticity of the brain opens up a new relationship to what is real or not.

The curator could help correct some biases. When we process information, we tend to perceive it as we think it is, rather than as it really is. Moreover, the curator could break free from purely technical rules to try to develop new criteria and thus set a precedent in platform governance.

We find ourselves caught in a vice: on the one hand, citizens may be deprived of their individual narrative, even after death; on the other hand, aspects of memory that should be preserved can disappear without appeal due to the mere decision of a business.