The number of Chinese websites is shrinking and posts are being removed and censored, stoking fears about what happens when history is erased.
Chinese people know their country’s internet is different. There is no Google, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. They use euphemisms online to communicate the things they are not supposed to mention. When their posts and accounts are censored, they accept it with resignation.
They live in a parallel online universe. They know it and even joke about it.
Now they are discovering that, beneath a facade bustling with short videos, livestreaming and e-commerce, their internet — and collective online memory — is disappearing in chunks.
A post on WeChat on May 22 that was widely shared reported that nearly all information posted on Chinese news portals, blogs, forums, social media sites between 1995 and 2005 was no longer available.
“The Chinese internet is collapsing at an accelerating pace,” the headline said. Predictably, the post itself was soon censored.
Welcome to the Great Leap Forward 2.0
This is a drop in the ocean compared to the centuries of lost physical artefacts and writings.
I guess it depends on what you consider artifacts. 7% of every human who has ever lived is alive today. You can say many of the things people have owned are lost and some might be valuable to someone in the future. So much of our lives are online. I wonder how much of it will survive 100 years.
Hopefully not a lot. My guess is that onlyfans/pornhub and other assorted porn sites have been backup multiple times by multiple people. The rest of the internet is in the hands of the internet archive.