The internet shifted from feared permanence to silent disappearance of content

Evidence

For many years, a great fear was that internet content was permanent, with many nations passing “right to be forgotten” laws to help citizens expunge articles from Google. By the 2020s, old articles began to disappear without a trace, and Internet Archive, the most important nonprofit for preservation, was under attack. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 701

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• SEED: Angle: ‘The forgotten future’ — the cultural consequences of an era defined by deletion and link rot, mirroring how memory institutions from archives to libraries crumble at the exact moment culture becomes algorithmic.
• XREF: Connects to Library of Alexandria narratives and to digital preservation literature; also echoes the book’s chapter structure on how monoculture eras lose their historical record.

Related

• Internet content permanence reversed into silent disappearance by the 2020s (similarity 0.96)