What happens when the internet disappears?

A Pew Research Center study found 38 percent of webpages accessible in 2013 are not accessible today .

This happens because pages are taken down, URLs are changed, and entire websites vanish.

This is especially acute for news: researchers at Northwestern University estimate we will lose one-third of local news sites by 2025 .

We live in a content era, the creator economy, in which everyone and their grandparent has turned into a “content creator”.

Every digital media format, from the Bernoulli Box to the racks of servers, is ultimately doomed to obsolescence as it’s supplanted by the next innovation.

The boom in artificial intelligence standing out as a particularly brutal contributor to our present state, writes Andrew Hammond .

Hammond: We are destroying history and culture to fuel the empire, and the empire is profit.

The notion that everything that ever has been and ever will be on the internet will always be there feels less true in an era when data is constantly disappearing.

The internet is not, in fact, forever; sometimes the zombie of a bad take will linger, sure, but just as probably, we’ll vanish.

How comfortable are we with the disappearance of entire swaths of careers and artistic pursuits?.