The Internet Needs a Memory

In 1996, during the early years of the web, I could see that those of us who were participating online were creating an extraordinary new record of human activity—and allowing it to disappear almost as quickly as we made it.

The web was becoming the place where government officials made promises, journalists published information in the public interest, and ordinary people shared ideas and documented their lives.

Yet it was fragile—equal parts consequential and ephemeral.

Many people assume that once something is published online, it will remain forever retrievable.

The saying that “the internet never forgets” has produced a dangerously false sense of permanence.

In reality, the internet forgets continuously.

Websites are constantly revised, deleted, and abandoned altogether.

This is why, 30 years ago, I founded the Internet Archive.

I wanted to build a mechanism for permanence in the internet age.

Soon after that, I helped build the Internet Archive’s most-used resource, the Wayback Machine, a system that would preserve webpages as they appeared at any one moment in time, allowing future readers to return to those moments.

The idea was simple but urgent: If the internet was going to become humanity’s principal publishing platform, then it needed what every great publishing system that came before it had needed.

It needed a library.

People all over the world use the Wayback Machine all the time.

What began as an effort to preserve the web has become an essential tool for journalists, researchers, historians, and the broader public.