Everyone knows by now that the internet is fragile. Contrary to the folk wisdom that I always heard growing up — “Be careful what you post on the internet because it will be there forever!” — a devastating number of websites have simply disappeared for good. So much cool stuff is just gone, with no way to recover it. Statistics on this aren’t too hard to find; here’s a study on link rot that Pew published last year with some deeply depressing numbers.

The Internet Archive is great, of course. I’m glad they maintain the Wayback Machine, a service that I use constantly. But the ability to briefly resuscitate a dead link doesn’t fully offset the loss of the original. On a practical level, it’s just way harder to find new things as websites go dark. Making unexpected, organic discoveries is difficult enough now that Google is trash and social media is brimming with slop.

What I really want to emphasize, though, is how terrible the perceptual experience of trawling through a link-rotted internet is, at least for me. I’m an incessant collector of old posts and websites that seem cool, and I have a pretty sizable archive of browser bookmarks, some of which I’ve had for more than a decade. But more and more often, when I click on a link I want to revisit, or pull up an old essay I want to reread, I see — not just a 404 page or a “Webpage not available” error — but an entirely new site advertising some horrible cryptocurrency or gambling product or [insert your favorite scam here]. This keeps happening to little, obscure literary magazines that I used to like. Not only have their archives been obliterated, but their former web presence has been cannibalized by some shady company.

There’s something genuinely soul-crushing about this experience. Even when an archived copy of the original thing is accessible, it still can’t offset the sheer ugliness of what’s happened. A little part of me dies every time I click on what I thought was a link to a fun little essay about the ecological preoccupations of the Romantic poets or whatever only to be slapped in the face by AI-generated flashing pop-up ads for Zizzlecoin.

This is on my mind because, in addition to watching things that have inspired and nourished me disappear and be replaced by rancid dogshit, I’ve also seen my own writing be destroyed. This is not a new experience for writers on the internet — or even for writers, period; it’s not like writers who labored before the internet existed could always preserve their work — but it still really sucks when it happens to you.

Yesterday, I republished a piece of my reporting from a few years ago that succumbed to exactly this kind of decay. The magazine where it appeared doesn’t exist anymore, and its website now redirects to a URL that’s ostensibly related to surfing in Puerto Rico but is actually just a portal to some awful online gambling service. But at least now you can read it here on this website, if you want. (My republished piece, not the gambling site.)

Maybe now someone, at some point in the future, can still stumble across the piece without intending to and, perhaps, find value that in experience.