On paper, the tools to facilitate easy digital archiving already exist. We’re told that the wonders of cloud computing, Google Drive, and the endless memory of our Facebook profiles will hold our past lives in place for posterity, a constant reminder of selves we’d rather forget or those we wish had never left us. But in reality, the web remains a treacherous place for users keen on holding on to remnants of themselves, particularly in ways that escape corporate capture. As platforms and technologies reach obsolescence, abandoned by users eager to find the newest, most relevant home for their virtual selves, the cost of maintaining millions of photos, videos, songs, and memories overwhelms failing tech companies that aren’t in the business of remaining archivists of abandoned profiles.
It’s in this climate that Myspace announced earlier this year that it had lost its catalogue of user-uploaded music: some 50 million tracks disappeared in a moment of digital file corruption. While publications like the Guardian predicted a dozen years ago that Myspace would exist in perpetuity, its slow death was already underway just as the digital ink dried. (Digital newspapers are just as susceptible as everything else online to disappearance: one Columbia Journalism Review report found that the “majority of news outlets [interviewed] had not given any thought to even basic strategies for preserving their digital content.”)
Although Myspace still exists as a shell of its former self, the destruction of its entire music catalogue served as a reminder that the once-dominant social network hasn’t vanished completely. And yet, thanks to its poor digital stewardship, the first musical experiments of countless artists, amateur and professional, were lost in an instant. Even the announcement that 450,000 songs had been preserved by a team at the Internet Archive underlines the scale at which digital history can endure, precariously. While a one percent sample of the now-deleted archive could give any professional historian a lifetime’s worth of researchable material for study, it means little to those who made the nearly 50 million tracks that were lost, never to return. While the missing tracks may be remembered by many as the kind of digital debris that constantly churns from device to device, lacking any enduring value, the rate at which the internet swallows itself whole means that future historians may never be able to decide for themselves what was worth keeping for posterity.
At best, our digital past can feel like some half-remembered dream, in theory reachable but only occasionally dredged up by something like Facebook’s “On This Day” feature. While there’s a power in forgetting, this quasi-accessible personal archive makes any desire to return to the digital past unlikely, especially when huge chunks of our online presence, at least on Facebook, can be bound up in other people’s decisions. Your ex can delete their page, or at least the photos of your shared past. Suddenly a piece of your digital life would be lost forever.