Few days ago, I was talking to a friend of mine about some Yugoslav war stories I read on a forum years ago. There were interesting stories from the point of view of a common soldier. I remember the forum, and I remember that I was reading it for days, page after page. Sadly the name escapes me now, but it should be relatively easy to find it on google, right? Well…

I’m sure I’m not the only one who noticed that google went completely to shit few years ago, and you cant find anything meaningful on it anymore. I even have this feeling that the top links are made by AI, just to pull you into their website to show you ads. And who can compete with AI? It can write thousand of articles in seconds. That is why I always add “reddit” at the end of my search query, just to read a human response.

I still use google daily, especially google maps, which I find very useful. But good luck finding something more obscure. Parallel to google I use a Russian search engine called Yandex. Yandex is basically Russian google, and a bit more, with its own self driving taxi service and even small (very cute) delivery robots on the streets of bigger Russian cities. Their search engine is like google from 2009, you can find anything on it. Well, almost anything.

But its not only googles fault. There are more and more dead links, ghost websites which haven’t been updated for 5-6 years, but somehow are still online. There is this saying “Once its online, it stays there forever”, but is this really true? Are those 150 pictures from the Halloween Party 2010 still somewhere on Facebook’s server, even though you deleted your profile seven years ago? And what about your long forgotten myspace profile? Is it still there?

Lets come back to the Yugoslav war forum I was talking about in the beginning. There is a very high chance that the forum is long dead and offline and a very low chance that someone archived the stories. Some of those posters are for sure long gone now. Some of them probably told their stories only anonymously online, because they were so horrific that their loved ones wouldn’t and couldn’t understand. All those stories will disappear, all those anecdotes, horrific but also funny moments will be erased from collective memory in a span of a generation. I highly doubt that anyone will care about them in 10 to 20 years anyway.

What is also noticeable is this shift away from traditional websites to more decentralized, fractured rooms, or better call it bubbles, like telegram, which is the final frontier of the old internet, wild and still not so regulated. All the big corporations are so omnipresent on the traditional internet, that it is no wonder people looked for alternatives. Considering also that modern mainstream journalists are mostly cocaine fueled arseholes that would sell their own mother just to keep their lifestyle, telegram is maybe the only way to get real unfiltered information on various (political) topics.

So what is the solution to this? To archive as much as possible personally. I have around 2,5 terabytes of movies, series, books and various PDFs which are long gone from the internet. Invest in a VPN, download everything and hoard it for some future use. Who knows how the internet will look like in 20 years, but I recon we, the people, will be pushed aside, and find refuge in old IRC networks, telegram channels and unlisted forums.