Every day
Every time my feed reader boots up, usually when I restart my machine after Apple forces me, it produces a tiny red lightning bolt: Feeds that are gone. Click to remove them forever. Some I don’t remember—a stray interest in Egyptology, leading me to follow some random academic, and they finally let the domain expire and get the lightning bolt. Such is life. My RSS feed file must be 20 years old at this point, through multiple careers and hobbies. It’s full of such things, the OPML of Theseus. But sometimes it is old URLs I recognize—names, ideas, things bubbling up. Usually I just tell it to stop checking; sometimes I go see what’s there now. Sometimes people have moved on to new endeavors and updated the site, and their RSS feeds—which were anchored to blogs not updated in a decade—finally stopped caching. Domains have expired and Bitcoin has moved in, or GoDaddy DNS now squats there. We move on, and so does DNS—although there is a sense of rot; it’s pretty rare that the good old thing is replaced by a good new thing. Sometimes it makes someone else pop into my head and I go look—what is wood s lot up to and he passed nearly a decade ago. But the site is still there, on the National Capital FreeNet. And that is a blessing. But I also think about the last Tweet, the last Facebook post, the last blog post. How will these shapes metamorphasize? Will someone hold up a sugarcube-sized bit of glowing metal and say, “check it out, it’s the Internet” that word itself pointing to something ancient and gone? Because it will happen. It must. We won’t outlive it, ourselves, but one day there will be no need for servers and clients, and old decrepit protocols, and the last server will be turned off, save for a few decrepit hobbyists, who still have what they think of as blogs, like some people still have swords, or weave by hand.