Having read the whole thing, it seems partially good, martially misguided, and partially terrible.
The overall bent is a hand-wringing about link rot, which I thought we mostly got over a decade ago. The Internet is fundamentally ephemeral. If you see something you like, save it so you can repost it later. If you rely on someone else to keep in up indefinitely, you're being foolish.
Around the edges of that main discussion, the Atlantic also touches on censorship in all the wrong ways, re-iterating the too-common view that censorship is good as long as the good guys do it. They at least argue that this censorship should be transparent and censored works still accessible in some way, but they seem to not understand the nature of what they're talking about.
Censored works aren't censored to protect the public. They're censored to protect the rich and powerful. That's why "right to be forgotten" really exists. That's why Google and Youtube and Twitter and Facebook quash anything that goes against the accepted narrative in any given field. They aren't protecting the public from dangerous misinformation. No one gives a shit about the public. They're protecting the financial and political interests of some very powerful people.
Given this, talk of a "poison cabinet" only illustrates ignorance of the issue. The Memory Hole cannot be divorced from the censorship process, it's a core part of it. If people can still find the information in some form, it's not censored enough to make the people it threatened happy.
And this leads to the final point, which is that the real reason the web is "rotting" isn't link rot, it's censorship on the part of tech monopolies, due to their joined-at-the-hip relationship with every large corporation and industry imaginable due to advertising and other deals. The fact that links die doesn't matter much: you can just repost the material. The fact that links ARE ACTIVELY KILLED to suppress their information is a much more serious problem, and one that doesn't have an easy solution besides full breakup of the tech monopolies.
I'm not 100% convinced by your assertion that censorship only favors the rich and powerful. It can and often does, but it can also help people without power or society and large. For instance, taking down a dox for a niche YouTuber is clearly not helping a powerful person, but it's still arguably censorship.
The misinformation area is somewhat stickier, but here's a decent example: if somebody decided to hurt you by spreading rumors (let's say that you watch CP) and spends time and money to get that rumor top of any SEO and forum thread, what's the right course of action? How good are you going to feel about using speech to counteract that when the result is a Google search giving your denial in spot 1 and the accusation in spot 2?
We all have to grapple with power and the ability to abuse it, but I don't think it's effective to say power is fundamentally wrong. The conversation is more nuanced than that and has to be viewed as systems with checks on power, which means specific design-thinking.
> if somebody decided to hurt you by spreading rumors
We have libel laws to address that.
GPs point is that Google, Facebook, et. al. are premptively censoring non-mainstream content just to protect themselves. They don't really care about the public.
To protect themselves from the public. Whether it's because consumers might take their business (and their data) elsewhere in disgust at what a particular platform is turning into, or because democratically elected lawmakers could start imposing sanctions or new regulations.
Companies are always looking out for themselves, that's a given. But that doesn't mean their actions are completely divorced from public opinion.
>The overall bent is a hand-wringing about link rot, which I thought we mostly got over a decade ago. The Internet is fundamentally ephemeral. If you see something you like, save it so you can repost it later. If you rely on someone else to keep in up indefinitely, you're being foolish.
Did we? Should we?
Acknowledging the current state of affairs doesn't require accepting its flawed nature.
Imagine a world where gasp the BBC, NYTimes, etc. kept all versions of their articles available and online. Where the "pretty URL" shows the most recent version of a page, provides a permalink, and provides permalinks to all previous versions of a page.
I don't expect most sites to do this, but since someone else mentioned the BBC, I am targeting journalism as an example.
The overall bent is a hand-wringing about link rot, which I thought we mostly got over a decade ago. The Internet is fundamentally ephemeral. If you see something you like, save it so you can repost it later. If you rely on someone else to keep in up indefinitely, you're being foolish.
Around the edges of that main discussion, the Atlantic also touches on censorship in all the wrong ways, re-iterating the too-common view that censorship is good as long as the good guys do it. They at least argue that this censorship should be transparent and censored works still accessible in some way, but they seem to not understand the nature of what they're talking about.
Censored works aren't censored to protect the public. They're censored to protect the rich and powerful. That's why "right to be forgotten" really exists. That's why Google and Youtube and Twitter and Facebook quash anything that goes against the accepted narrative in any given field. They aren't protecting the public from dangerous misinformation. No one gives a shit about the public. They're protecting the financial and political interests of some very powerful people.
Given this, talk of a "poison cabinet" only illustrates ignorance of the issue. The Memory Hole cannot be divorced from the censorship process, it's a core part of it. If people can still find the information in some form, it's not censored enough to make the people it threatened happy.
And this leads to the final point, which is that the real reason the web is "rotting" isn't link rot, it's censorship on the part of tech monopolies, due to their joined-at-the-hip relationship with every large corporation and industry imaginable due to advertising and other deals. The fact that links die doesn't matter much: you can just repost the material. The fact that links ARE ACTIVELY KILLED to suppress their information is a much more serious problem, and one that doesn't have an easy solution besides full breakup of the tech monopolies.