Pluralistic: Linkrot (21 May 2024)

pluralist
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Originally published at: Pluralistic: Linkrot (21 May 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow



Today's links


A 1994 Yahoo homepage. It is animated. The blue links blur and then disappear.

Linkrot (permalink)

Here's an underrated cognitive virtue: "object permanence" – that is, remembering how you perceived something previously. As Riley Quinn often reminds us, the left is the ideology of object permanence – to be a leftist is to hate and mistrust the CIA even when they're tormenting Trump for a brief instant, or to remember that it was once possible for a working person to support their family with their wages:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/27/six-sells/#youre-holding-it-wrong

The thing is, object permanence is hard. Life comes at you quickly. It's very hard to remember facts, and the order in which those facts arrived – it's even harder to remember how you felt about those facts in the moment.

This is where blogging comes in – for me, at least. Back in 1997, Scott Edelman – editor of Science Fiction Age – asked me to take over the back page of the magazine by writing up ten links of interest for the nascent web. I wrote that column until the spring of 2000, then, in early 2001, Mark Frauenfelder asked me to guest-edit Boing Boing, whereupon the tempo of my web-logging went daily. I kept that up on Boing Boing for more than 19 years, writing about 54,000 posts. In February, 2020, I started Pluralistic.net, my solo project, a kind of blog/newsletter, and in the four-plus years since, I've written about 1,200 editions containing between one and twelve posts each.

This gigantic corpus of everything I ever considered to be noteworthy is immensely valuable to me. The act of taking notes in public is a powerful discipline: rather than jotting cryptic notes to myself in a commonplace book, I publish those notes for strangers. This imposes a rigor on the note-taking that makes those notes far more useful to me in years to come.

Better still: public note-taking is powerfully mnemonic. The things I've taken notes on form a kind of supersaturated solution of story ideas, essay ideas, speech ideas, and more, and periodically two or more of these fragments will glom together, nucleate, and a fully-formed work will crystallize out of the solution.

Then, the fact that all these fragments are also database entries – contained in the back-end of a WordPress installation that I can run complex queries on – comes into play, letting me swiftly and reliably confirm my memories of these long-gone phenomena. Inevitably, these queries turn up material that I've totally forgotten, and these make the result even richer, like adding homemade stock to a stew to bring out a rich and complicated flavor. Better still, many of these posts have been annotated by readers with supplemental materials or vigorous objections.

I call this all "The Memex Method" and it lets me write a lot (I wrote nine books during lockdown, as I used work to distract me from anxiety – something I stumbled into through a lifetime of chronic pain management):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

Back in 2013, I started a new daily Boing Boing feature: "This Day In Blogging History," wherein I would look at the archive of posts for that day one, five and ten years previously:

https://boingboing.net/2013/06/24/this-day-in-blogging-history.html

With Pluralistic, I turned this into a daily newsletter feature, now stretching back to twenty, fifteen, ten, five and one year ago. Here's today's:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/21/noway-back-machine/#retro

This is a tremendous adjunct to the Memex Method. It's a structured way to review everything I've ever thought about, in five-year increments, every single day. I liken this to working dough, where there's stuff at the edges getting dried out and crumbly, and so your fold it all back into the middle. All these old fragments naturally slip out of your thoughts and understanding, but you can revive their centrality by briefly paying attention to them for a few minutes every day.

This structured daily review is a wonderful way to maintain object permanence, reviewing your attitudes and beliefs over time. It's also a way to understand the long-forgotten origins of issues that are central to you today. Yesterday, I was reminded that I started thinking about automotive Right to Repair 15 years ago:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/05/right-repair-law-pro

Given that we're still fighting over this, that's some important perspective, a reminder of the likely timescales involved in more recent issues where I feel like little progress is being made.

Remember when we all got pissed off because the mustache-twirling evil CEO of Warners, David Zaslav, was shredding highly anticipated TV shows and movies prior to their release to get a tax-credit? Turns out that we started getting angry about this stuff twenty years ago, when Michael Eisner did it to Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 911":

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/05/us/disney-is-blocking-distribution-of-film-that-criticizes-bush.html

It's not just object permanence: this daily spelunk through my old records is also a way to continuously and methodically sound the web for linkrot: when old links go bad. Over the past five years, I've noticed a very sharp increase in linkrot, and even worse, in the odious practice of spammers taking over my dead friends' former blogs and turning them into AI spam-farms:

https://www.wired.com/story/confessions-of-an-ai-clickbait-kingpin/

The good people at the Pew Research Center have just released a careful, quantitative study of linkrot that confirms – and exceeds – my worst suspicions about the decay of the web:

https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/

The headline finding from "When Online Content Disappears" is that 38% of the web of 2013 is gone today. Wikipedia references are especially hard-hit, with 23% of news links missing and 21% of government websites gone. The majority of Wikipedia entries have at least one broken link in their reference sections. Twitter is another industrial-scale oubliette: a fifth of English tweets disappear within a matter of months; for Turkish and Arabic tweets, it's 40%.

Thankfully, someone has plugged the web's memory-hole. Since 2001, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has allowed web users to see captures of web-pages, tracking their changes over time. I was at the Wayback Machine's launch party, and right away, I could see its value. Today, I make extensive use of Wayback Machine captures for my "This Day In History" posts, and when I find dead links on the web.

The Wayback Machine went public in 2001, but Archive founder Brewster Kahle started scraping the web in 1996. Today's post graphic – a modified Yahoo homepage from October 17, 1996 – is the oldest Yahoo capture on the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/19960501000000*/yahoo.com

Remember that the next time someone tells you that we must stamp out web-scraping for one reason or another. There are plenty of ugly ways to use scraping (looking at you, Clearview AI) that we should ban, but scraping itself is very good:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

And so is the Internet Archive, which makes the legal threats it faces today all the more frightening. Lawsuits brought by the Big Five publishers and Big Three labels will, if successful, snuff out the Internet Archive altogether, and with it, the Wayback Machine – the only record we have of our ephemeral internet:

https://blog.archive.org/2024/04/19/internet-archive-stands-firm-on-library-digital-rights-in-final-brief-of-hachette-v-internet-archive-lawsuit/

Libraries burn. The Internet Archive may seem like a sturdy and eternal repository for our collective object permanence about the internet, but it is very fragile, and could disappear like that.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Got a cell-phone? FCC claims the right to search your house https://www.wired.com/2009/05/fcc-raid/

#15yrsago Infinite Typewriters: Goats webcomic collection is transcendantly silly without being forced https://memex.craphound.com/2009/05/20/infinite-typewriters-goats-webcomic-collection-is-transcendantly-silly-without-being-forced/

#15yrsago Fight terrorism by arresting terrorists, not by looking at our genitals at airports https://edition.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/05/18/airport.security.body.scans/

#15yrsago Lessig reviews Helprin’s embarrassing infinite copyright, bloggers-are-stupid, Creative Commons is evil book https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-solipsist-and-the-int_b_206021

#10yrsago Podcast: Firefox’s adoption of closed-source DRM breaks my heart https://ia802206.us.archive.org/30/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_273_fixed/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_273_Firefoxs_adoption_of_closed-source_DRM_breaks_my_heart.mp3

#10yrsago Interviews with & portraits of sex-machine makers https://web.archive.org/web/20140903013303/http://designyoutrust.com/2011/08/sex-machines-photographs-and-interviews-by-timothy-archibald/

#10yrsago Steve Wozniak explains Net Neutrality to the FCC https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/steve-wozniak-to-the-fcc-keep-the-internet-free/68294/

#10yrsago Disneyland’s original prospectus revealed! https://memex.craphound.com/2014/05/20/disneylands-original-prospectus-revealed/

#10yrsago Jo Walton’s “My Real Children”: infinitely wise, sad and uplifting novel https://memex.craphound.com/2014/05/20/jo-waltons-my-real-children-infinitely-wise-sad-and-uplifting-novel/

#5yrsago That billionaire who paid off a graduating class’s student loans also supports the hedge-fundie’s favorite tax loophole https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/04/10/a-private-equity-titan-with-a-narrow-focus-and-broad-aims/

#5yrsago TOSsed out: EFF catalogs the perverse ways that platform moderation policies hurt the people they’re supposed to protect https://www.eff.org/tossedout

#5yrsago How Warner Chappell was able to steal revenues from 25% of a popular Minecraft vlogger’s channels https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZplh8rd-I4

#5yrsago Notorious forum for account-thieves hacked, login and messages stolen and dumped https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/05/account-hijacking-forum-ogusers-hacked/

#5yrsago A look back at the sales training for Radio Shack’s Model 100, a groundbreaking early laptop https://www.fastcompany.com/90349201/heres-how-radioshack-sold-its-breakthrough-laptop-circa-1983

#5yrsago DRM and terms-of-service have ended true ownership, turning us into “tenants of our own devices” https://www.wired.com/story/right-to-repair-tenants-on-our-own-devices/

#5yrsago Research shows that 2FA and other basic measures are incredibly effective at preventing account hijacking https://security.googleblog.com/2019/05/new-research-how-effective-is-basic.html

#5yrsago A deep dive into the internal politics, personalities and social significance of the Googler Uprising https://fortune.com/longform/inside-googles-civil-war/

#1yrago Dumping links like Galileo dumped the orange https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/20/the-missing-links/#plunderphonics

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Michael Dimock.

Currently writing:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025

  • Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

  • Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

Latest podcast: No One Is the Enshittifier of Their Own Story https://craphound.com/news/2024/05/19/no-one-is-the-enshittifier-of-their-own-story/

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

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From the “clickbait kingpin” article:

He’s not a mustache-twirling supervillain, chortling as he spews journalism-killing AI slime. He’s an affable young dad who wants his kid to have a nicer childhood than he did.

He is an incarnation of The Banality of EvMalevolence⁰. It sucks he had a rough childhood, and his desire to provide for his family is admirable, but “just trying to make a living” is not a good enough defence for the harm he’s instigating. He’s literally making the internet that his kid will grow up trying to use, worse.

The “car vs horse” analogy is flawed in a number of ways, but if I might strain it a bit further then I would say that while cars do harm the planet, they can still have productive uses as transport. However, what Vujo is doing is not transport. He’s doing burnouts and donuts in the middle of a public street at rush-hour, causing harm for no benefit other than his own self-gratification, and hindering everyone else who is trying to use their cars as responsibly as possible.

We will not publish anything against anyone on Apple Daily, especially. I love and respect China too.

I wonder if he feels the same way about neo-Nazis.

⁰ What he’s doing is awful, but I can’t bring myself to label it with the same phrase that was coined to describe a literal genocide.

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We need a decentralized non-profit Internet Archive. Part of its fragility is linked to the fact that someone is trying to make money off of it and it becomes a single point of failure as a result. There are always going to be people who want to erase things from the internet just like there are always going to be people who want to burn books. A pluralistic solution puts many individuals, non-profits, and public institutions like universities and libraries in a position to assist with the mirroring and preservation of this data and history.

I also use this all the time and I don’t think throwing money at a company to try and defend it from some of the largest, richest, and most powerful corporations on the planet is a good use of our resources. It is a single point of failure and we need this to be something that can’t be deleted because no one can wrangle control over it.

We should be looking to the same technologies for decentralization and mirroring that pirates use as they have proven robust for handling large amounts of data and being resilient to, ironically and perhaps not coincidentally, some of these exact same companies. A protocol could probably be layered right over top of it so every movie torrent now comes with a few hundred megs of news articles and webpages. All the art and all the other history and knowledge preserved together by people’s thirst for entertainment, heh.

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