I had a Twitter account with 5K+ followers and 10K+ Tweets which had a record of all my articles and blogs. That got hacked and hijacked one day and all my old Tweets just vanished. I used to write regularly for Sify and had more than 1000 articles and one day they just upgraded the website and all those articles now show broken links.

I had made a list of all of my correct predictions on the internet and now there’s no proof as my old Twitter feed and article archive has been 404ed. One of my Tweets had more than 3K ReTweets and 140K views and I found that on the Internet Archive. I was happy since the original Tweet had gone. Now I am hearing that even the Internet Archive is on its way out.

So is the Internet really forever? We were taught that civilization began around 6000 years ago. However now there are theories that Göbekli Tepe, the Sphinx and the submerged city of Dvārakā could be more than 10,000 years old. If that’s true, then most of the records simply vanished.

Paper/papyrus records wither and die. Libraries are burned to the ground. Stone tablets with inscriptions survive, but are gibberish if you don’t know the script. I have many floppy disks (the new generation doesn’t know what they are) which are useless for me. CD/DVD drives are on their way out. They may become like floppy drives.

Websites have to keep getting upgraded otherwise they may lose content. And they may especially lose content thanks to the upgrade. We are creating a record amount of content compared to the history of our civilization, but how long will all that last? In fact one could argue that in a catastrophe, it would be easier for all that content to be wiped out.

Stone tablets last for thousands of years. Paper can too if preserved correctly. In a catastrophe they can be preserved. But for the content of today you need a device, electricity, the Internet and a server and someone who is maintaining all that 24X7. Come to think of it, it’s much easier to lose content today. In fact it’s much easier to lose ALL the content today. That’s quite a sobering thought.

On a side note maybe that’s a good thing for content creators. There have been reports of artists destroying all their works and beginning afresh.

On a personal note, now when I usually meet a person for the first time, they don’t know what my politics is thanks to most of my political Tweets and articles being taken off the grid! Nice to start fresh with someone without having any misconceptions.