A coalition of major record labels has filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive—demanding $700 million for our work preserving and providing access to historical 78rpm records. These fragile, obsolete discs hold some of the earliest recordings of a vanishing American culture. But this lawsuit goes far beyond old records. It’s an attack on the Internet Archive itself.
This lawsuit is an existential threat to the Internet Archive and everything we preserve—including the Wayback Machine, a cornerstone of memory and preservation on the internet.
At a time when digital information is disappearing, being rewritten, or erased entirely, the tools to preserve history must be defended—not dismantled.
This isn’t just about music. It’s about whether future generations will have access to knowledge, history, and culture.
The following guest post from artist and writer Brooke Palmieri is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
As a writer and artist that draws on the long history of gender nonconformity in my work, a driving force behind my practice is the idea that a longing for history will always be a fundamental aspect of humanity, so long as memory itself serves as a foundation for human consciousness. Everyone has a history, but the majority of people are not taught how to look back in order to find it. One problem is the depth and breadth of our losses. People and their prized possessions are destroyed by accident and by design throughout history: armed conflict, invasion, willful destruction, natural disaster, decay. Then there is the fantasy of destruction, a destructive force in its own right, the perception that nothing survives. That fantasy begets a reality of its own: because I don’t go looking for what survives, I don’t find it, or I don’t recognize it when I see it. This is true across subcultures and among historically marginalized or oppressed groups, and for the queer and trans subjects whose histories I am interested in recovering in particular. In the twenty-first century, access to queer and trans history is an accident of birth: knowing someone in your family or neighborhood, living in a place where it isn’t legislated against, going to a school that dares teach it, affording admission into one of the universities that offers classes on it.
My research process tends to triangulate between the archive of my own weird and imperfect human experiences and the debris I collect around them, small collections amassed by and for queer and trans people, and larger institutions that also contain relevant material that begs to be recontextualized. Or to make it personal: to write my upcoming book Bargain Witch: Essays in Self Initiation, I used my journals and the Wayback Machine to look at old websites I’d made when I was 14, the archive of the William Way LGBT center in Philadelphia where I grew up, and special collections at major institutions like the Fales Library at NYU, the Digital Transgender Archive at Northwestern University, and the British Library in London. All my adult life I’ve made pilgrimage between the intimate domestic spaces where people preserve their own histories, to local collections set up on shoestring budgets as a labor of love, to the vast, climate-controlled repositories of state and higher education that have more recently begun to preserve our histories, each enhancing what it is possible for me to know, delight in, or mourn, about where I have come from, the forebears by blood and by choice that imbue my life with its many possibilities.
It’s a creative act to find and make sense of my own history, one that requires a leap of faith in order to fill in the silences, erasures, omissions, and genuine mysteries that old books and documents, records and artifacts, represent. A lot is left to the imagination. Much of what survives from the past asks more questions than we can answer. This is true for queer and trans archival traces, as it is for other aspects of humanity that are poorly accounted for in public records, or actively discriminated against through surveillance and omission in equal parts.
Classically, archives are brutal, desolate places to find humanity; they were never meant to record the nuances of flesh and blood existence so much as they originate as a way governments keep track of their resources. It has taken millennia for us to conceive of records as places where humanity might be honored rather than betrayed. This is an epic change: I am in awe of the fact that I live in a time where the heft of documentary history—clay, parchment, paper, and now pixel—is shifting paradigms from records kept by anonymous paid laborers to flatten life into statistics, to records kept by people who dare to name themselves and their subjectivity, who collect something of themselves and their obsessions, for other kindred spirits to find. From archives as places meant to consolidate power, to places containing mess and sprawl, places for heated encounters.
In the past few decades of “living with the internet” these places and encounters have multiplied exponentially, as queer and trans subcultures have relied on message boards, blogs, and personal websites to share information. I personally relied (and still rely on) on reddit, and the classic, Hudson’s FTM Resource Guide (www.ftmguide.org), and TopSurgery.Net to navigate the healthcare system in both the UK and USA in order to access hormones and surgery—part of a much longer tradition of “the Transgender Internet” that Avery Dame-Griff chronicles in his book The Two Revolutions (2023). To say nothing of AOL in the early 2000s, the culture on Tumblr in the early-to-mid 2010s and printed publications like Original Plumbing andarchived copies of the FTM Newsletter. Digital environments informed me of physical places, and vice versa, and each expanded and embellished my appreciation of the other. From reading books and trawling the internet, I knew places like San Francisco, New York, London, and Berlin would be where I could find other trans people. When I moved to London, I knew to go to Gay’s the Word, a queer bookshop that first opened in 1979, to make friends, and eventually, to get a job. When I started my own queer book club, or wanted to find zine fairs or club nights, I often found information about them on tumblr or instagram. When traveling to new cities, a gay friend tipped me off that any place recommended by BUTT Magazine would show me a good time.
But in my queer and trans context, both digital and paper-based archives and libraries are often labors of love, made from scratch, published with a “by us for us” ethos that is under-resourced and so always in danger of disappearing. Most queer publishing from the 1960s onward was issued in small, independent presses that have disappeared. An interesting model for documenting this is the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, where resources and expertise is shared to catalog and digitize collections materials in a centrally kept database. This is mutually beneficial to the places where the materials are kept—accurate cataloging is crucial to using and developing any archive—as well as to interested audiences further afield. And this feels also like a pragmatic approach to the reality of loss: we might not be able to predict what will survive over time, but keeping abundant records in multiple locations of what has existed will at least allow us to mourn our losses.
A culmination of my interests in hunting and gathering queer history is my imprint and traveling installation: CAMP BOOKS. I started CAMP BOOKS in 2018 as a way to highlight the places I’d most enjoyed meeting queer and trans people–independent bookshops, which have a rich, radical history throughout subculture–and as a way to keep the focus on making and distributing publications about the obscure histories I was unearthing in my research. Before libraries sought to cater to an LGBTQIA+ readership, specialist bookshops like the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, Giovanni’s Room, and Gay’s the Word were the only places you could find concentrations of queer, feminist books with positive portrayals of queer lives. These shops were hubs of culture: places where community events were held and publicized, activists groups were able to meet, and friendship and romance could blossom in broad daylight. CAMP BOOKS sets up pop-up bookshops, tables at art and zine fairs, and also builds installations in galleries and community spaces to continue this tradition. I also sell rare books and ephemera related to queer history through CAMP BOOKS in order to fund our efforts, including new publications, zines, and posters related to queer and trans history. The CAMP BOOKS motto is: “Queer Pasts Nourish Queer Futures,” and this extends to our model of generating funds from past efforts to fund new writing and work. I also believe this logic can extend to anyone: preserving what interests you about the past brings a particular pleasure of connection into the present. Most of the people I have loved in my life, I have met and known through shared obsessions with the past, and it has brought a lot of pleasure and adventure into my life.
An abiding concern I have had about cultural preservation—in my case, subcultural preservation, because the people I love across time existed in a myriad of DIY subcultures that often cross-pollinated art, music, and literary influences—and have heard from others, revolves around the question of inheritance and access. You can inherit books and papers, art and artifacts, but you can’t inherit e-books, and born digital archives require specialist care and technology. My hope is that this divide is bridged by reconsidering the nature of inheritance itself: rather than an individual’s gain, queer and trans history is something that we are all heir to, and can all benefit from accessing. Large institutions, and large digital repositories in particular, play a crucial role in rewriting the meaning of inheritance by offering freely accessible, and accurately cataloged, information. But ultimately, archives that document human experience begin at home, and rely on people whose love for their lives, their friends, and their scenes inspire them to save posters, photographs, and other receipts–online and offline–that document their experiences. I hope after reading this, you start saving something of your life now.
About the author
Brooke Palmieri is an artist and writer working at the intersection of memory, history, and gender-bending alternate realities. In 2018, Brooke founded CAMP BOOKS, promoting access to queer history through rare archival materials, cheap zines, and workshops/installations. His book, Bargain Witch, comes out in Fall 2025 by Dopamine Books. You can find out more at http://bspalmieri.com.
The internet is a living, breathing space—constantly growing, changing, and, unfortunately, disappearing. Important articles get taken down. Research papers become inaccessible. Historical records vanish. When content disappears, we lose pieces of our shared knowledge.
That’s where the Wayback Machine comes in. With the Wayback Machine’s Save Page Now tool, you have the power to help preserve the web in real time.
Why It Matters:
Prevent Link Rot: Keep references intact for future research.
Preserve Digital History: Ensure cultural moments remain accessible.
Save What Matters to You: You choose what to archive and preserve.
Nathan J. Robinson, editor-in-chief of Current Affairs.
An independent magazine published in New Orleans is proving that it’s possible to succeed without accepting advertising or putting up barriers requiring readers to pay for content.
In 2015, Nathan J. Robinson and Oren Nimni raised more than $16,000 in a Kickstarter campaign to launch Current Affairs, a print magazine featuring political analysis and satire. Its lean staff of six produces six issues a year, as well as a podcast and digital newsletter. To operate, the magazine relies on donations, grants and individual subscriptions—although its content is available to the public online for free.
Robinson said he’s motivated by the all-too-common and damaging problem that “the truth is paywalled but the lies are free,” which he’s famously written about in the magazine. Outrageous stories and misinformation are easy to access, while factual news stories often require subscriptions to read.
“The moment you put in a paywall, you’re cutting down the potential audience—and you’re cutting it down to the people who are really committed, rather than those who need to read the piece the most. I want to reach the people who need to read it closely,” Robinson said. “It’s really important for democracy, because people need to be able to make informed decisions.”
Running a progressive magazine not backed by corporate interests gives the editorial staff latitude to tackle issues with a different lens, said Robinson, 35, who has a law degree and PhD in sociology. With so many distractions in the daily news, Current Affairs tries to keep people focused on what matters; for instance, critiquing how climate change policies should be addressed, and analyzing U.S. policy with Haiti over time. In 2023, Robinson wrote an article on the history of the New Masses magazine, exploring its mission as a left-leaning publication from 1926-1948.
“Being independent gives us so much creative freedom,” Robinson said. “We’re very experimental.”
Current Affairs has 3,000 subscribers (who pay about $70 a year), and staff work to build deep connections to secure their loyalty. Robinson hosts regular online Zoom sessions to get feedback from subscribers and extends an open invitation to stop by the magazine’s office in the Central Business District of New Orleans for a cup of tea.
Current Affairs covers
Robinson’s goal: cultivate a community that wants to support the publication, rather than thinking of subscribing as transactions. When there is a new project or initiative, the magazine reaches out to subscribers for additional donations and often finds they are responsive.
“We’re trying to demonstrate the viability of independent media,” Robinson said. “We hope we inspire others to believe it’s possible and not accept the conventional wisdom that you need to put content behind paywalls, because you don’t.”
Content is produced by three editors (the other staff members cover graphics and operations) and freelance writers. Robinson said salaries and payments for submissions are modest to keep costs down, with an annual budget of just $600,000. The publication relies on traffic from social media to attract new readers. The team is dedicated to do what it can to persuade others about policy and culture, he said, and provides easy access to the public to join in the discourse.
Robinson said the work of Current Affairs and the Internet Archive intersects, as both strive to remove barriers to knowledge.
“The Internet Archive functions as a library should, putting out a lot of raw information,” Robinson said. “Our job is to sift through the information. Collection is important, but analysis is also important.”
In his work, Robinson said he frequently turns to the Internet Archive. After finishing graduate school at Harvard University, he lost access to the campus library. “The Wayback Machine is unbelievably important to anyone who wants to seriously research anything, because stuff goes away,” he said.
Robinson co-authored a book with Noam Chomsky, The Myth of American Idealism, which was released by Penguin Random House last year. Since many of the books cited in endnotes were out of print, Robinson said the Internet Archive was invaluable in verifying sources.
Recently, the magazine became registered with the Internal Revenue Services as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. With that new designation, it began to seek additional support and just received its first grant from the Craigslist Foundation. The hope is to expand its funding to be able to hire reporters to do more original reporting, Robinson said.
New start-ups, especially in the media space, struggle to find a sustainable business model, but Current Affairs continues to grow: “It feels amazing to bring something into the world that isn’t like everything else,” he said. “We’ve been around for eight years now, and we’re going to stay around many more.”
The following guest post from writer and editorial director JD Shadel is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
Once upon a time, everything on the Internet existed in one single location: on a Wal-Mart flat-pack desk in my childhood home. OK, that’s not technically accurate, but it felt very true to me then. When I sat on that height-adjustable ergonomic desk chair, the whole Internet seemed to rest on that particle-board desk, which sagged under the weight of the chonky desktop computer it held.
I first glimpsed the World Wide Web through an off-white monitor four times the size of my young skull. The first sound the Internet made was, of course, a screech—i.e., the symphonic shriek of dial-up. A kid in the hills of Appalachia, I turned up the volume knob on the clunky speakers to hear 19 or so screaming seconds of skooo skeee skooo skeee dooo skahhh skaaaaaaahhhh skahhhhhh on full blast.It made my mom cringe, which made me love it more. This was the fanfare for us early cybersurfers, a sound announcing that we were all logging on. And when this sound concluded, I saw this new world. Internet Explorer would load the web’s jittery rhythms: a seemingly endless sea of constantly looping GIFs that felt as cheeky and comical as they felt fresh.
For those who came of age with the early days of the World Wide Web as I did, that dial up shriek sounded like the future. And that future looked like the web’s emergent image filetype: the new Graphics Interchange Format combined multiple frames into a single file, displaying basic animations on repeat. It quickly came to define the dot-com aesthetic.
The limited bandwidth and capabilities of the day’s desktop computers helped GIFs transcend technical barriers to become an icon of the time. Soon, everything seemingly imaginable had been GIFed: dancing babies, dancing skeletons, and, of course, loads of cat GIFs. There were timely GIFs for everything from “The Simpsons” cartoons and e-pet like Tamagotchi keychains and a Furby blowing bubble gum (like those I have sampled on my writing website, which highlights a few dozen from my personal collection saved through the years).
As culture increasingly flourished on the Internet throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, culture increasingly looked like GIFs. GIFs became the first widely adopted computer art, the vernacular for the first-wave of Internet memes, and the way contemporary Internet users then expressed what we today might call our “personal brand.” If you click around a few personal pages from GeoCities, the first major platform that let individuals host their own websites (archived on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine), you’ll see how early Internet users would select a series of decorative GIFs like clip-art to express their identities and interests in these emerging virtual spaces. GIFs served functional purposes, too—they were used as spacers to define different sections of a page, for instance. They were also an animated way to invite someone to take some desired action, such as send you an email or sign your guestbook. On forums, GIFs even became avatars and the visual representation of our “netizen” personas at a time when not everyone was comfortable using real names or photos online.
But in my mind, nothing captures the creative spirit of the early-Internet era quite like the rich “under construction” subgenre, which I’ve cataloged in my own personal GIF collection I began archiving during the pandemic using GifCities.
Due to easier-to-use hosting services and the relative ease of learning HTML essentials, the landscape of personal websites in the web 1.0 felt handmade and do-it-yourself. If you were working on a new website but it wasn’t quite done, you’d be prone to make the incomplete version live and highlight the pages that weren’t finished with a litany of GIFs themed around building physical infrastructure—think animated flaggers holding signs, jittery construction workers operating jackhammers, and dump trucks and the like.
The physical construction metaphor speaks to the collective sense then that the World Wide Web was a place we were engaged in making together. Dropping a few construction GIFs on your page was a way to indicate “hey, this is a work in progress”—and it was a continual reminder that this new medium was something we could all play some small role in shaping. I don’t want to indulge in undue nostalgia. The early web was a capitalist place built on the backs of government-funded networking systems that had become accessible to folks outside academic circles with the World Wide Web. Many of our current challenges have roots in decisions made during the early Internet days. But there is a lesson inherent in that era that a lot of us have forgotten, as the Internet has started to feel more like a generic shopping mall as opposed to the digital public square it’s always been mythologized as.
Back then, there was a more palpable sense that we were all netizens—even the “noobs,” the irritating new kids like me logging on every evening from their parents’ computers. We were citizens of something collective. I might’ve been a nobody queer kid living on farmland in coal country. But when I got online, I was participating in building some corner of this wild thing we called the web. The web was never truly democratic, of course, but those early days did have a sense of openness and humanness that was apparent in its incompleteness. Whenever we advertised that the current reality was soon to change, we were drawing attention to the fact that we were all working on figuring out what this could become.
As with a lot of things on the web, GIFs were everywhere until the moment they weren’t.
As connection speeds increased and web 2.0 shifted toward a glossier and more sanitized user experience, early web GIFs faded into obscurity—looking as dated as the candy-like iMacs and the much clunkier but still colorful HP tower computer my family had.
Even so, GIFs would not die. While the file format itself may have faded into obscurity, video file formats that mimic the repeating nature of the original GIFs became somewhat incorrectly dubbed “GIFs” and embedded firmly in the meme stylings of Tumblr, Facebook, and soon every messaging app on the planet.
Today, the Internet doesn’t feel like a single place in our lives. The idea of having a designated space in your home where you engage with the digital world is old-fashioned. “I miss the computer room,” culture writer Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick eulogized earlier this year in a cool short essay in their newsletter, The Trend Report. Many of us do our day jobs on laptops, are programmed to repeatedly check the notifications on our “phones”—which we primarily use to connect to Internet-enabled services rather than actually phone anyone—and if not that, we’re on our iPads or glancing at our smart watches. By referring to an era of the Internet when it was accessible only through designated corners of our physical lives, I’m showing my age—and also drawing attention to how quickly digital culture evolves as the technology fueling it changes.
Early GIFs off GeoCities websites are really only accessible thanks to the work of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and the GifCities search engine that the Archive launched in 2016 in commemoration of its 20th anniversary. That, to me, underscores a fact about the modern Internet that we take for granted: with 5G common, including in many subway tunnels, and Wi-Fi in some jurisdictions a publicly funded utility freely accessible in certain cities’ streets, the Internet can seem like the air around us.
But the Internet isn’t invisible. It’s a very physical thing encompassing mind-boggling maps of wires and undersea cables, and networks including countless privately owned and operated data centers—and in this current era of the web, where so-called “artificial intelligence” is causing an up-tick in the environmental and human impacts of this technological infrastructure, it’s good to be reminded of the physicality of the digital world.
When somebody flips off the servers, as GeoCities did when it shuttered in the late 2000s, the world risks losing all artifacts of that culture if they’re not preserved. GIFs that seemed like they’d dance forever simply disappear—for example, if the only copy of the file existed on a floppy disk that was, say, burned in 1999.
This is, after all, the ephemeral truth of the Internet: if you don’t save it, even if it seems like it’s everywhere momentarily, it will just as quickly disappear.
When we preserve digital culture that would otherwise vanish, we don’t necessarily gain the keys to a richer creative future. Again, the web has largely moved on from early GIFs. I’ll be the first to admit that we don’t become more virtuous by being enthusiasts of outdated image types (in the same way that listening to music on vinyl records doesn’t necessarily make you cooler or a more conscious listener).
But when we preserve and revisit the remnants of digital culture’s recent history, it behooves us to remember that this networked realm, as imperfect and as frustrating as it can feel sometimes, is what we make it. And maybe if we realize that, we can start to again play a more active role in shaping a better collective future that many of us want. In the meantime, the GifCities database of millions of GIFs provides plenty of entertaining throwback material for your browsing pleasure. Heck, maybe it’ll even inspire your own GifCities-themed website, as it did with my recent website update. (I spoke to Chris Freeland, the Director of the Internet Archive’s Library Services, about it earlier this year. Yeah, it obviously features the bubble-gum blowing Furby.)
About the author
JD Shadel is a writer and editorial director from the Appalachian Mountains and now based in London, where they recently launched ESC KEY .CO, a new media outlet examining tech and modern life with skeptical curiosity. Their work often focuses on trends where the online and offline worlds blur. Before moving to the United Kingdom, they spent nearly a decade in Portland, Ore., where they freelanced widely as an editor and served as The Washington Post’s travel writer for one of America’s most consciously “weird” cities. Shadel launched the Future of Travel column for Condé Nast Traveler in 2023, serves as editor-at-large at Good On You, and has contributed to VICE, BBC News, Them, Bloomberg CityLab and other outlets. Their long-form reporting was named among VICE’s Best of 2017. They completed their MA with Distinction in international relations at the University of Exeter.
The Wayback Machine, Archive.org, Archive-it.org, and OpenLibrary.org came up in stages over the week after cyberattacks with some of the contributor features coming up over the last couple of weeks. A few to go. Much of the development during this time has been focused on securing the services so they can still run while attacks continue.
The Internet Archive is adapting to a more hostile world, where DDOS attacks are recurring periodically (such as yesterday and today), and more severe attacks might happen. Our response has been to harden our services and learn from friends. This note is to share some high level findings, without being so detailed as to help those that are still attacking archive.org.
By tightening firewall technologies, we have changed how data flows through our systems to improve monitoring and control. The downside is these upgrades have forced changes to software, some of it quite old.
The bright side is this is forcing upgrades that we have long planned or hoped for. We are greatly helped by the free and open source community’s improving tools that can be used by large corporations as well as non-profit libraries because they are freely available.
Also, some commercial companies have offered assistance that would generally be prohibitively expensive. We are grateful for the support.
Where the Internet Archive has always focused on building collections and preserving them, we have been starkly reminded how important reliable access is to researchers, journalists, and readers. This is leading us to install technical defenses and increase staff to improve service availability.
Libraries in general, and the Internet Archive in specific, have been under attack for many years now. For us it started with the book publishers suing (about lending books), and now the recording industry (about 78rpm records), which is a drain on our staff and financial resources. Now recurring DDOS attacks distract us from the goals of preservation and access to our digital heritage.
We don’t know why these attacks have started recently and if they are coordinated, but we are building defenses.
We are grateful for the support from our patrons, through social media, through donations, and through offers of help, which frankly, makes it worthwhile to keep building a library for all of us.
The following guest post from researcher Amanda Gray Rendón is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
When asked to consider women’s care labor, people likely think about feminized gender roles within “the domestic sphere” where labor has historically been invisible and undervalued. For women of color, the lines between public and private have often been blurred, as evidenced by the family photo of my great-grandmother picking beets in a field while caring for my two-year-old grandmother. Sixty years later the roles would reverse and my grandmother would serve as the primary caregiver for her mother with Alzheimer’s dementia. I could not begin to quantify in dollars the thirteen years of 24/7 care she provided our family.
In U.S. culture, women have historically been thought of as “natural” caregivers or predisposed to caring for others, so little to no concern has been given to assigning monetary value to the labor that women are expected to perform.
This begs the question: how can we adequately archive a history that is designed to be hidden and undervalued precisely because of how invaluable it is to our social, cultural, and economic fabric?
Women’s care work—both paid and unpaid—serves as the foundation on which the world’s postindustrial economies have functioned. Working mothers and caregivers often participate in what scholars refer to as the “double-day,” or the “double shift.” This is when (predominantly) women have an income-earning day job followed by unpaid caregiving labor they provide their families when they get home in the evening after “work.” Some have argued women’s care work has expanded into a triple shift whereby women have taken on more caregiving roles within their communities, adding significantly to gendered burdens of care.
The invisible, and at times isolating, nature of care work contributes to the precarity of archiving women’s care labor history. To preserve this aspect of our cultural history, it’s vital to engage with those performing care work, as well as to understand the different ways that community care work is performed. Documenting caregiver culture on social media allows us to identify the contributions that caregivers and care communities make, along with the barriers they face.
No one has helped me to understand this more than Cynthia “Cindy Ann” Espinoza. Cindy Ann and I met when we both attended Metropolitan Community Church in San Antonio. She graciously offered to participate in my research when I spoke at a community education session on Alzheimer’s disease that the church sponsored in collaboration with the local chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association. We became Facebook friends shortly thereafter and I observed firsthand the virtual care work in which Cindy Ann participated, as well as the archive she had created of the “real world” care she provided her mother who passed from complications of Alzheimer’s dementia several years earlier.
On January 17, 2017, about a week before PBS aired the documentary Alzheimer’s: Every Minute Counts, Cindy Ann posted a video excerpt from the film to her wall on Facebook. The three-minute video, with 4.4 million views and over 5,000 comments, was originally posted to Facebook by Next Avenue, a PBS digital publication dedicated to issues facing individuals over 50 years old in the United States. The documentary follows Daisy Duarte, a Latina in Minneapolis, as she cares for her mother, Sonja, who is living with early-onset Alzheimer’s dementia.
Next Avenue’s original post reads, “Millions of Americans will be able to relate to this story.” Cindy Ann identified herself as one of those millions of Americans almost five years after her mother’s passing from complications of Alzheimer’s dementia. Her post included the message, “I can relate to this woman in this story. Its the hardest thing to see ur parent dealing with Alzheimer”s ..but i did it for 9 yrs caring for my Mom i have no regrets. I would do it all again even if she didn’t remember who i was. I love & miss you dearly Mommy..” Cindy Ann watched Daisy wash her mother’s clothes, brush her teeth, apply her makeup, do her hair, show her how to hold a spoon, sit her in a recliner to watch television—all while exclusively speaking Spanish. The invisible care work Cindy Ann provided her mother nearly a decade before was publicly visible for the world to see.
I also related to the family portrayed in the film. As I viewed the video, I was reminded of my own experience helping my grandmother care for my great-grandmother when the three of us lived together in San Antonio. This personal connection prompted me to comment with a note of: “thanks for sharing.” I appreciated the connection Cindy Ann created in that moment.
Several of her other Facebook friends left comments in response to her post. There was one from an employee at a local adult daycare facility: “Yup and ur mama was a beautiful blessing for us at seniors 2000! I loved her so much <3;” and another from a current caregiver, “Aww I’m doing it right now. My heart aches every time I leave my mom. I pray for her mind to heal. It’s one of the ugliest diseases ever encountered! I pray they find a cure very soon.” Others were comments of support, such as: “Super hard, girl.” and “Amen.”
The commenters were all women who either acknowledged Cindy Ann’s experience as their own or validated it with words of empathy and support. That winter morning, Cindy Ann’s public Facebook page was a place where women came together to share a commonality of experience in an online space. The care community helped to make visible their friend’s caregiving labor, as well as their own—in effect becoming a part of care labor history.
Though the internet seems to be “forever”, the ephemeral nature of certain online spaces—such as social media pages and posts that can be deleted or websites that are no longer supported—necessitates an archival space such as the Internet Archive, which on May 9, 2017 captured the full-length documentary Cindy Ann posted about. Nowhere else on the internet can I access this film without a subscription, rental, or purchase. As a researcher, the Wayback Machine is an invaluable archival research tool that I rely on to provide accurate records of historical online spaces I can no longer access. However, we must find a way to better preserve social media pages such as Facebook, Instagram, X, and others where caregivers post and provide community care. The sheer volume of pages and posts may have made this a challenging task previously, but with new AI language learning models, we can begin to conceive of ways to more pointedly target and capture the rich history of online care communities and women’s virtual care work.
To preserve a more complete and inclusive history of women’s caregiving labor, digital archivists must seek out the spaces where women are performing the work. The Internet Archive serves as a record that women’s care communities exist, have always existed, and will continue to exist. Documenting the challenges women caregivers face, the support they need, and their shared spaces of communal experience helps to create a more complete historical record of their cultural impact for future generations.
About the author
Amanda Gray Rendón is a community-based researcher, writer, oral historian, and documentary filmmaker. She is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Narrative Medicine and Digital Health Humanities at Wheaton College. She received her PhD in American Studies with concentrations in Mexican American & Latina/o Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies from The University of Texas at Austin. Prior to her work in academia, Gray Rendón was a project manager in implementation services for a medical software company followed by several years in case management for a mediation and arbitration firm in Washington, D.C. She is the recipient of fellowships and appointments at several institutions, including the Inter-University Program for Latino Research, Earlham College, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and Saint Louis University. Her scholarship centers the lived experiences of Latina professional and family caregivers. Her commitment to social justice and accessible community-based knowledge production is a core principle of her scholarship and pedagogy.
The following Q&A between writer Caralee Adams and journalist Philip Bump of The Washington Post is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
Philip Bump is a columnist for The Washington Post based in New York. He writes the weekly newsletter How To Read This Chart. He’s also the author of The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America.
Caralee Adams: What does it mean for an individual journalist to have their work preserved? Why is it important to have easy access to news stories from the past?
Philip Bump: One of the nice things about my career has been that I’ve worked for outlets that I feel confident are doing their own preservation, like TheWashington Post. I’m not particularly worried about losing access to my writing. However, it’s less of a concern for me than it is for other outlets, unfortunately. It is unquestionably the case that I find the Internet Archive useful and use it regularly for a variety of things—both for its preservation of online content and collection of closed captioning for news programs.
Any recent examples of when you’ve found the Internet Archive particularly useful?
I use the search tool on closed captioning more than anything else. The other day I was trying to find an old copy of a webpage. I was writing about Donald Trump’s comments on Medal of Honor recipients. As it turns out, there is not an immediately accessible resource for when Medals of Honor were granted to members of the military. You can see aggregated—how many there are—but you can’t see who was given a medal and when they served. I actually used the Internet Archive to see how the metrics changed between the beginning of Trump’s presidency and by the end of it. I was able to see that there were medals awarded to about 11 people who served during the War on Terror, three who served in Vietnam, and one during World War II. Then, I was able to go back and double check against the Trump White House archive, which is done by the National Archives, and see the people to whom he had given this award. That’s a good example of being able to take those two snapshots in time and then compare them in order to see what the difference was to get this problem solved.
Why is it important for the public to have free public access to an archive of the news for television or print?
It’s the same reason that it’s important, in general, to have any sort of archive: it increases accountability and increases historical accuracy. The Internet Archive is essential at ensuring that we have an understanding of what was happening on the internet at a given point in time. That is not something that is constantly useful, but it is something that is occasionally extremely useful. I do a lot of work in politics and get to see what people are saying at certain points in time, which are important checks and accountability for elected officials. The public can know what they were saying when they were running in the primary as compared with the general [election]. The Archive allows anyone to be able to get information from websites that are no longer active. If you’re looking for something and you have the old link to Gawker or the old link to a tweet, you can often [find] it archived. The Internet Archive doesn’t capture everything—it couldn’t possibly do so. But it captures enough to generally answer the questions that need to get answered. There’s nowhere else that does that. There are other archiving sites, but none that do so as comprehensively, or none with an archive that goes back that far.
Has any of your journalism vanished from the public? Do you have any examples where you’ve been looking for something and it’s been missing?
Yes. One of the challenges is that multimedia content has often, in the past, been overlooked. There are old news reports that I’ve been unable to find because they’re on video in the era before there was a lot of accessibility and transcripts. Therefore, yes, there are certainly things like that which come up with some regularity. Also, particularly in the era of 2005 to 2015, there were a lot of independent sites that had useful news reports—particularly since we’re talking about the cast of political characters that have been around in the public eye at that point in time. It’s often the case that it’s hard to track those things down. Or if you’re trying to track down the original source or verify a rumor, you might need to dip into the Archive. There are a lot of sites from that era of “bespoke” blogs that the Internet Archive often captures.
How does limited access to historical data or previous coverage impact you as a journalist?
It is hard to say, because relatively speaking, I am advantaged by the fact that I live in this era. If I were doing this in 1990, [I’d use] basically whatever was at the New York Public Library and on microfiche. It is far better than it used to be, but the amount of content being produced is also far larger. It is both a positive and a negative that it is far easier to do that sort of research here from my desk at home than it would possibly have been 30 years ago. In fact, I was working on a project where I relied heavily on a local newspaper in a small town in Pennsylvania that wasn’t available online. I literally had to hire someone in the town to go to the library, find [coverage from] the particular date and the local paper and to get the scans done. It cost me hundreds of dollars, but that was the only way to do it. You can see how getting these things done is problematic and challenging.
When Paramount deleted the MTV News Archive in June, there was a lot of dismay, but some say it was frivolous, disposable, and kind of meant to be thrown away. How do you feel about that?
My first writing gig online was at MTV News in college, so that actually had a personal resonance for me. I was at Ohio State in the early to mid 1990s, and I got this little internship with MTV News. I wrote one piece about this band called The Hairy Patt Band. It ended up on the MTV News website. I was very excited. I haven’t seen that in 30 years. It’s one of those things where I wondered what ever happened to that story or if it exists anywhere, in any form. So, that [news] actually had resonance. It’s a bummer. Is it as important to maintain the archives of MTV News as it is The Washington Post? I’m biased, but I would say, no. But it is still a loss of culture—and it is a unique loss of culture. This was a unique and novel form of information that was emergent in the 1990s and now is lost. In the moment, its very existence captured the culture in a way that is worth preserving.
How do you feel about the future of digital preservation of news, data, and information?
I’m more pessimistic than I used to be. I came of age with the internet. When it was new, I used to describe it as the emergence from a new dark age. We had all this information and there was no more going back. All this existed. Everything was online, and we had archives. Now, we see, in part because the scale has increased so quickly that economic considerations come into play, and all of a sudden… the internet isn’t just an endless archive anymore. There are very few places that are doing what libraries do to capture these things on microfiche or store books for the public’s benefit. There is so much of it and that becomes the problem.
Why is it important to pay attention to this issue and preserve journalism for future reporters?
It is obviously the case that we are creating information, culture, and benchmarks for society faster than we can figure out how we’re going to make sure they’re preserved. I think that’s probably always been the case, except that what’s different now is that we are more cognizant of the process of preservation and the challenges of preservation. We expect there to be this thing that exists forever. We don’t yet know how to balance the interest in having as few things be ephemeral as possible, versus the value in doing that… maybe it’s not even possible to preserve everything in the way that we would want to at scale. We have created a process by which it is possible to record and observe nearly everything, and now we’re realizing that that is potentially in conflict with our desire to also store and preserve all this information indefinitely.
Anything you’d like to add?
I think it’s worth noting that preservation is one of the few areas in which I think artificial intelligence bears some potential benefit. One of the things that I’ve long found frustrating is that The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other major news outlets, have enormous storehouses of information—not all of it textual. The New York Times must have, in its archives, photos of every square inch of New York City at some point in time over the course of the past 100 years. Artificial intelligence is a great tool for indexing and documenting. We now have tools that allow us to go deeper into our archives and extract more information from them, which I think is a positive development, and is something I’ve advocated for a long time publicly. Only with the advent of artificial intelligence does large-scale preservation become something that seems feasible. One can go through the National Archive and extract an enormous amount of information that is currently stored there in an accessible form, which saves someone from having to stumble upon a particular image. I think that is beneficial. I don’t think that necessarily solves the storage at scale issue, but it does address the fact that so much information is currently locked away and inaccessible, which is another facet of the challenge.
About the author
Caralee Adams is a journalist based in Bethesda, Maryland. She is a graduate of Iowa State University and received her master’s in political science at the University of New Orleans. After working at newspapers and magazines, she has been a freelancer covering education, science, tech and health for a variety of publications for more than 30 years.
Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security.
The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.
The Wayback Machine, Archive-It, scanning, and national library crawls have resumed, as well as email, blog, helpdesk, and social media communications. Our team is working around the clock across time zones to bring other services back online. In coming days more services will resume, some starting in read-only mode as full restoration will take more time.
We’re taking a cautious, deliberate approach to rebuild and strengthen our defenses. Our priority is ensuring the Internet Archive comes online stronger and more secure.
The following guest post from editor and journalist Maria Bustillos is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.
On August 13, 1961, the Sunday edition of The Honolulu Advertiser published its official Health Bureau Statistics (“Births, Marriages, Deaths”); on page B-6, in the leftmost column—just below the ads for luau supplies and Carnation Evaporated Milk—the twenty-second of twenty-five birth notices announced that on August 4, Mrs. Barack H. Obama of 6085 Kalanianaole Highway had given birth to a son. The Honolulu State Library subsequently copied that page, along with the rest of the newspaper, onto microfilm, as a routine addition to its archive. Decades later, as Donald Trump and his fellow “birthers” tried to deceive the public about the birthplace of the 44th president, researchers were able to read the item in its original, verified context, preserved on its slip of plastic film.
A dramatic fate like that one awaits very few reels of microfilm, but the story underscores the crucial importance of authentication, and of archiving. Verifying and making sense of records—books, photos, government documents, magazines, newspapers, films, academic papers—is a never-ending task undertaken not only by historians but also by researchers, journalists, and students in every branch of learning: in the sciences, in medicine, in literature and philosophy and sociology. This is scholarship—the job of sieving over and over through the past, to research the truth of it, to reflect on and comprehend it, in the hope of providing people with useful observations, ideas, and help. That’s why we need records as detailed and accurate as we can make them; that’s the ultimate value of librarianship and archival work.
When people foolishly—and even dangerously—imagine that the past won’t matter to the future, the chance to preserve history evaporates. We live in times of increasing book bans and censorship and fast-deteriorating online archives. Some writers are even willing to deny the lasting value of their own work, shrugging off its place in a unique cultural moment. In July, when the archive of MTV News was summarily vaporized, contributor Kat Rosenfield wrote dismissively of her own work there:
So much of what we—what I—produced was utterly frivolous and intentionally disposable, in a way that certain types of journalism have always been. The listicles and clickbait of early aughts culture may differ in many ways from the penny press tabloids of the 1800s, but in this, they are the same: They are meant to be thrown away.
It’s a shocking thing, to hear a journalist say that the writing of the 19th-century penny press was “meant to be thrown away.” The rise of the penny press represents a key moment in the democratization of media; Benjamin Henry Day, founder of the first such newspaper in the U.S., TheNew York Sun (“It Shines For All”), is a towering figure in the history of journalism. (His son, Benjamin Henry Day Jr., invented Ben-Day dots!)
Day offered nonpartisan newspapers at a cheap price to a mass working-class audience—a fascinating mix of hard-hitting news, sensationalistic crime reports, and plain whoppers. The Sun ran a deranged report of winged people living on the moon, and it also broke the story of the Crédit Mobilier/Union Pacific corruption scandal in 1872, which brought down a whole herd of Republican congressmen, plus then-Vice President Schuyler Colfax. Day’s rivals, James Gordon Bennett and Horace Greeley, founders of The Herald and The New York Tribune, respectively, were no less momentous figures in the history of news media. Their sociological, cultural and political impact reverberates still: Bennett’s racist, segregationist views were hot issues in a New York Times story published just a few years ago, and a kaleidoscopically weird July op-ed in the Idaho State Journal called vice presidential candidate JD Vance “A Horace Greeley for Our Century,” despite the fact that Vance is a far-right reactionary conservative, in sharp contrast to Horace Greeley, who held openly socialist, feminist, egalitarian views.
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Pace Rosenfield, we can count ourselves fortunate that the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has preserved nearly half a million articles at MTV News; because of the Wayback Machine, future readers will have access to primary source materials on Peter Gabriel’s social activism, MTV News’s Peabody Award-winning “Choose or Lose” voter information campaign, early coverage of the allegations against pop icon Michael Jackson—and all the details and facts that will be available to provide crucial background and verification for stories we can’t yet imagine.
What we call history is only the Now of an earlier time, recorded and preserved as best we can and reconsidered afterward. There is no complete and knowable record of any part of the past, no magical, permanently accurate “history.”
Maria Bustillos, journalist and editor
The MTV News archive joins the archives of Gawker, the LA Weekly, and many other shuttered digital-native publications that would have disappeared entirely from the internet but for the Wayback Machine. Many leading journalists have greeted the Wayback Machine’s archival efforts with relief, and not only because it means preserving access to their own clips. They want all the receipts to be kept.
Tommy Craggs, a former executive editor at Gawker, expressed this idea back in 2018: “There should be a record of your fuck-ups and your triumphs, too.” He viewed Gawker’s archive as a valuable “record of how life was lived and covered on the internet for an era. Taking that away [would be] leaving a huge hole in our understanding.”
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What we call history is only the Now of an earlier time, recorded and preserved as best we can and reconsidered afterward. There is no complete and knowable record of any part of the past, no magical, permanently accurate “history.” The records we are keeping now—filled as they are with contradictions, uncertainties and errors—are all that tomorrow can inherit from today. Each teeming, incoherent moment succeeds the last, Now upon Now, wave upon wave of recordings and photographs, testimonials and accounts—true, false, and everything in between—gathered together by librarians and archivists and hurled forward like a Hail Mary pass into the future.
In other words, nothing is “meant to be thrown away.” Nothing. People may someday want to look into what happened in any part of the world, among any of its people, at any time; and every researcher, reader, and writer will have their own ideas, ideas that we might find incomprehensible now, about what’s worth keeping.
About the author
Maria Bustillos is an editor and journalist in favor of equality, press freedom, libraries, archives, beauty, and fun.
