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Art by Annie Gugliotta/GZERO Media
No, the internet isn’t forever. And that’s a bad thing.
It is currently some time in the 23rd century, and a scholar of the future wants to understand what was happening in 2024 in, say, Gaza, Ukraine, or Beijing. Surely she’ll be able to find what she needs — it’ll all be online right?
We are used to thinking that the internet is forever. Sometimes this can seem like a bad thing. Every dumb remark, ill-conceived costume, or bad hot take will be fixed indefinitely in the digital firmament, waiting to be dug up as a cancellable offense. But it’s also a good thing: Every atrocity, corruption scandal, transformative artwork, or major scientific discovery will also be there — forever.
The trouble is -- that's not true. The internet is not forever. In fact, in many cases it isn’t even for 100 days, the average length of time before content is changed on a webpage.
Just how ephemeral is the internet? A recent Pew study found that nearly 40% of web pages viewable in 2013 simply do not exist any more. They’ve evaporated into the digital ether, either because their owners ran out of the money or the interest they needed to maintain them.
Meanwhile, hyperlinks, an essential part of the digital information experience, are also famously flighty. A Harvard study of more than 2.5 million links from New York Times articles published between 1996 and 2020 found that at least a quarter of them were dead. 404. RIP.
To be fair, none of this is necessarily terrible.
There is plenty of crap on the internet. A lot of blogs just aren’t good. And this video of Donald Trump as the Ramones, or this one in which two cats argue about a broken ice cream machine at a McDonalds drive-thru aren’t necessarily essential texts of our time (though to be fair, I am on the fence about the cat one because it’s pretty amazing.)
But this Great Digital Transience doesn’t just affect cat videos or bad blogs. It can also affect public records and, importantly, journalism.
A 2021 report by the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri showed that out of two dozen major newspapers, only seven were fully archiving their material, and much of that was only final text, rather than all digital content that was part of each article. And that, of course, is for newspapers that are still in business. Many – in fact an increasing number, as we know – are not. When they go belly up, their digital content often vanishes.
I have some personal experience with this. If you go looking for any of the dozens of articles and profiles that I wrote for FT Tilt, a special project of the Financial Times, in Brazil in 2011, you will find nothing. Nada. When the FT cut the project in 2011, they also scrapped the website. Everything we had investigated, documented, or written – gone. Alas, my findings will be of no use to that future scholar passionately interested in Brazil’s early 20th century “deindustrialization.”
Failing to adequately archive our material is only one problem. Another is that the platforms where we do store much of our content are highly concentrated in the hands of a few powerful companies and countries.
Consider the fact that three vendors – Amazon, Microsoft, and Google – account for two thirds of all cloud storage. That concentration creates efficiency, sure, but also huge risks. What happens if any of those companies goes out of business, is attacked, or goes rogue? A lot could happen between now and the 23rd century.
For an extreme version of the risk here, look at China. There, the Communist Party all but owns the Internet — and as we speak, whole swaths of history are being erased.
There have been efforts to address this problem of internet impermanence. The Internet Archive, with its popular Wayback Machine, is a heroic, decades-old project that aims to copy and store every single web page that has ever been created. It works with governments and media to record particularly important documents for the historical record.
But even that database isn’t capturing everything. And in the end, it too is just another website, beholden to the vagaries of money, space, and electricity like all the others.
To be clear, I am no luddite. Having the internet and digital media — which more or less make the sum total of human knowledge instantly available to… anybody — is way better than not having it.
The problem is that having it depends on keeping it. And that means preserving it in formats that can be flighty, easily changed, or swiftly erased. In a world of polarization, cratering trust, and open lies, it is more essential than ever to care for the drafts of history that we are writing.
I don’t know if this idea or this article will still exist in 2224.
I’d like to think it will. But just in case — print out a hard copy.
Your own little Davos: Why trust is failing and what to do about it
With the world’s Most Powerful People™ busily pondering the fate of the rest of us at Davos this week, I thought to myself I’ll be damned if I’m not gonna go skiing too. So last weekend, I went with the family to Belleayre, a small mountain in upstate New York.
It’s not quite the same as Davos. The Eastern Catskills are not the Swiss Alps. I have it on good authority that the cost of a single schnitzel at Davos comfortably buys lunch for a family of four – maybe even six – at Belleayre.
But when it comes to places for thinking deep thoughts about the world, one mountain is as good as another. And since the Davoisie have dedicated their high-altitude gathering to the theme of “Rebuilding Trust,” I figured I also could think about trust while hitting the slopes.
Trust, as we keep hearing, is broken. Only 16% of Americans trust “government” – that’s down more than 60 points from “peak trust” in the mid-1960s. Fewer than a third of Americans trust each other, down from nearly 47% in the early 1970s. Meanwhile, half of Americans say “the media” deliberately misleads them, and fewer than one-quarter say journalists have society’s interests at heart.
But these data sometimes feel abstract. Like something that’s happening out there rather than right here. Well, a ski mountain is a good place to observe trust in action – a microcosm of the thousand little leaps of faith in people and things that get us through our days.
Consider the following: When you read the ski report and believe it, you are trusting the media. When you allow yourself to be whisked up the side of a mountain by a giant metal hanger with seats on it, you are trusting the institutions and experts who design and run ski lifts. (A sudden gust of wind will quickly heighten this trust.) And when you hit the lodge for lunch or the aprés, leaving your skis or snowboard on a rack unattended, you are showing social trust.
You can do this experiment anywhere, by the way. On your commute, where the subway conductor will not crash the train. On the highway, where the person driving toward you will not cross the double-yellow line. At the café, where the employees have washed their hands before returning to work. At the gym, where your spotter can, in fact, spot.
Why does trust seem to work at the mountain, the subway, the café, or the gym – but not in our national politics? Come closer. Trust works best when the stakes are immediate and observable. Where you can verify, you can trust. The farther things get from what you can see with your own eyes, the harder it is to believe in anything. Our online experiences only heighten this, of course: They are algorithmically engineered to feel close, personalized, and personal.
The data bear this out: Even amid the broader black diamond descent of trust, local institutions still shine. Polling by the Knight Foundation shows Americans are 17 points more likely to trust local news sources than national ones – (which makes the well-documented decline of local news 17 points more alarming.)
The same is true of government. Gallup found that while only a third of Americans trust the federal government, nearly 70% trust local government, where practical results are usually more important than partisan smackdowns.
With all this, it’s no wonder – as we head into a crucial global election year – that populism and nationalism are so appealing again. They’re each, in their ways, responses to falling trust in distant institutions. Populism seizes on our perfectly understandable lack of trust in distant institutions: Those people up there on the mountain are lying to you, let’s fight back. Nationalism and nativism propose a solution of their own, artificially shrinking the boundaries of society to tighten its bonds: It’s us vs. them. Let’s trust us.
What’s the solution? Lots have been written about this. But one place to start is by focusing on the places where things do work: invigorating good local government, reversing the decline of local media, and emphasizing the experiences of actual people rather than online avatars.
There’s no one solution, but, to flip a phrase from someone who knew a thing or two about trust: Keep your friends close, and your institutions closer.
See you on the slopes!
When did people stop trusting the media?
There was a time, not so long ago, when people trusted the media, and not just their specific corners of it. Walter Cronkite. Edward R. Murrow. Dan Rather. These were people all Americans relied on to understand the world, and they did so without suspicion. Today, we live in a different reality (or multiple realities, in fact). But according to media historian Nicole Hemmer, the war on trust began decades ago.
Starting back in the 1970s, Hemmer says, "...it was advantageous to the Republican Party to try to create an alternative to the mainstream media, an alternative to the Walter Cronkites...We see that with Fox News in the '90s, but also with the rise of talk radio, and then to some extent, the rise of alternative social networks that's happening now."
Hemmer joined media journalist and former CNN host Brian Stelter on a special panel interview for GZERO World with Ian Bremmer. The two discussed how the hyper-fragmented media landscape in which we find ourself has actually been decades in the making. And they look ahead to the 2024 election and consider how media companies can rebuild trust with Americans during such a crucial time for democracy.
Watch this episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: "Politics, trust & the media in the age of misinformation"
Watch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
Ian Explains: The media's trust problem
It’s getting harder and harder to tell fact from fiction. Trust in media is at an all-time low. At the same time, partisanship is skyrocketing, and generative AI is challenging the very idea of truth.
This week on Ian Explains, Ian Bremmer breaks down how the media landscape has changed since the early days of live TV and why the 2024 US presidential election will be a major test of our ability to detect and prevent misinformation from spreading online.
Cable news has come a long way from the 1960 presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, where Nixon famously showed up sweaty and pale, while John F. Kennedy showed up tanned and camera-ready. People who listened on the radio thought Nixon won the debate. But on TV, the advantage went to Kennedy and the polls quickly turned in his favor. It was the first-ever live TV debate and forever changed how media and politics interact with each other.
In the 60-plus years since, it’s only gotten harder to separate the message from the medium. A 24/7 cable cycle has turned the idea of news into mass entertainment. And hyper-partisan talk radio shows, thousands of political podcasts, and social media’s endless doom-scroll have created a perfect incubator for information––and disinformation––overload.
2024 will be the first US presidential election in the age of generative AI. The risk of spreading false or misleading information to voters is enormous. Despite calls from industry watchdogs and tech experts, US lawmakers have yet to pass any real guardrails for AI technology. And given the rapid pace of development, by the time the election rolls around next year, it will be even harder to tell an AI-generated video or image from the real thing.
Whether regulators and lawmakers can come up with an effective way to identify and combat AI misinformation is anyone’s guess, but one thing is clear: the stakes are incredibly high. And the future of US democracy may depend on it.
Watch Ian Explains for the full breakdown, and for more on the US, watch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer on US public television and at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld.