The internet is deciding what to forget

Imagine if, a hundred years from now, someone discovered that all that remains online from our era are memes of digital bananas wearing Hawaiian shirts and talking to pineapples. It sounds absurd, but that is exactly the question we are asking ourselves: What truly deserves to be preserved for the future, and what can we safely let slip into digital oblivion? Up until now, we have always thought of the internet as an infinite memory, an eternal archive where every post, video, or comment would remain forever. But the reality is the opposite: the web is starting to decide what to forget. Today’s argument is that the real challenge is no longer privacy or storage, but selection: who, or what, decides what is worth remembering online? Surprisingly, this selection is no longer made solely by institutions or librarians, but by automatic algorithms and the random decisions of private companies. Take, for example, the case of GeoCities: millions of personal pages, blogs, and forums from the 1990s vanished in one fell swoop when Yahoo decided to shut down the service. It wasn’t just digital junk: among those pages were diaries, love stories, and the stories of entire communities. A group of volunteers, the Archive Team, worked day and night to save what they could, but most of it was lost forever. Or consider how TikTok or Instagram can remove viral videos for reasons of copyright or “community guidelines,” erasing in a matter of seconds moments that may have shaped an entire generation. Behind every click on “Delete,” there’s not just an algorithm: there’s a decision about what society should or shouldn’t remember. And here comes the paradox: while we venerate every historical document found in an attic, digital culture risks disappearing without a trace, because no one has decided it was worth preserving. Yet, the data shows that over 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every day: it's as if a new ocean of memories is created every minute, but with no one to decide what to bottle and what to let evaporate. A friend of mine works at a digital museum, and he told me that he often desperately searches for original versions of websites or memes that have already disappeared: “It's like looking for family photos in a burning house, but the house is the web.” Now, the perspective that is often overlooked is this: if we let everything stay online forever, we would still risk drowning in an indistinct mass of data, where nothing holds any meaning anymore. The problem is not just what to forget, but how to make sense of what we choose to save. Digital memory is not neutral: it is an ongoing struggle between what we want to leave for posterity and what chance or the algorithm decides to let disappear. After all, the web is not an infinite library: it is an archive that forgets quickly, often without us even noticing. If this reflection has made you see the internet in a different light, you can indicate that on Lara Notes with I'm In — it's your way of declaring that this idea now belongs to you. And if you discuss it with someone, perhaps by sharing the story of Geocities or the image of the burning house, on Lara Notes you can capture that conversation with Shared Offline: that way, it remains part of your memory, not just part of the web. This Note is based on an article in the Financial Times: it would have taken you about 6 minutes to read the whole thing; here, you've saved at least 4 minutes.