This is not a problem unique to me: a recent Pew Research Center study on digital decay found that 38 percent of webpages accessible in 2013 are not accessible today. This happens because pages are taken down, URLs are changed, and entire websites vanish, as in the case of dozens of scientific journals and all the critical research they contained

How comfortable are we with the disappearance of entire swaths of careers and artistic pursuits? And who is making these decisions — private equity or journalists, AI or archivists, billionaires or workers? The answers to these questions, and the way we define ourselves today, will shape our culture of the future

When you describe yourself as a “writer” but your writing has become hard to find, it creates a crisis not just of profession, but identity. Who am I, if not my content? It is hard not to feel the disappearance of creative work as a different kind of death of the author, one in which readers can’t interpret my work because they can’t find it. It is a sort of fading away, of losing shape and relevance.

Historical content can be an incredibly informative resource, telling us how people lived and thought. But we must remember that it’s a small fraction of contemporaneous material that survives, even as we hope, of course, that it’s our own existence that is ultimately memorialized. Sometimes it is through the gaps that we read history or are forced to consider why some things are more likely to persist than others, are more remembered than others, why other histories are subject to active suppression, as we’re seeing across the United States with legislation targeting the accurate teaching of history.

While many have been enjoying a little AI, as a treat, dabbling in ChatGPT to help draft an angry letter to the utility company, or goofing around with increasingly unhinged Midjourney prompts, we are unwittingly contributing to the engine of our own despair.

AI is literally burning up the world in the name of profits, driving the climate change that causes toxic algae blooms. Much like the British tossing papyrus and mummies into the hungry maws of steam engines, we are destroying history and culture to fuel the empire, and the empire is profit.