Reading: Who Will Remember Us When The Servers Go Dark? By: Cade Diehm / On: 10 March 2026
We were told there would be no more forgetting. The cloud would remember everything, cyberspace would liberate us all. We would be furnished with an abundance of digital memory, permanence always just a hard drive away. Or a floppy disk, a tape, a USB key – anything really. The medium didn’t matter, only the promise that the data stored within would last forever.
I feel like this essay starts on a flawed premise of what 'we' were promised. I wasn't promised this. I was promised something else: The internet would liberate us all. The internet would introduce more democracy into the world. The internet would enable us to always be able to access certain 'valuable' things (e.g., from libraries) though it was never clear what 'valuable' would mean. But permanence was never one of those things because we realised how flimsy the premise of permanence on those devices was when I was a kid: VHS tapes could melt and be easily burnt, all disks were prone to some form of breakage, CDs could get irreparably scratched (regardless of how much toothpaste you put on them), and USB keys have been easily damaged and corrupted.
I do not know where this promise of permanence came from, but it was not something that I or others around me ever felt. If that were true, why would our computers or phones require such constant replacing or be made of such delicate materials that could lead to an easy break (or worse, be made in ways where something that used to be easily reparable now leads to permanent death of at least part of the machine, if not all of it).
Or maybe it's that my understanding of the 'permanence' is different from what the author intends. I'm not sure.
When the server goes dark, we go dark, too. We’ve built an entire civilisation on an unthinkably brutal and comically unreliable stack while hallucinating it as literally anything else. We condemn AI today for making shit up, but what about us? We’re building on a fantasy just as brittle, we are just as demonstrably wrong. Yet we pretend a file isn’t just a gesture that can disappear in an instant. We hallucinate that the server is somehow both fleeting and forever.
I do find this paragraph to be exceptionally interesting, though. It's so morbidly true that 'we' (which isn't really 'we') have built a world on something so absurdly fragile, on things that are so easily broken and lost (for better or worse). And we keep trying to build “infrastructure” to ensure that the fragility of that thing can't be harmed, which is also ridiculous.
This is such a good presentation of the inanity of the world we exist within. Though, it is important to realise that many of us have never had a say in this being the world we should have; it was the one many of us were siloed into, whether we wanted to be here or not.
Moxie Marlinspike is the glue of this project. He’s a lanky Steve Jobs-type, but a full-blown cypherpunk with dreadlocks, anarchist leanings, and a hacker’s trickster smirk. We’re camped in an off-season mansion Moxie has rented. The property spans three stories and is stuffed with hundreds of square feet of wicker furniture, a massive kitchen full of Miele whitegoods and a private beach nobody swims at. It is so fancy, I feel like we’ve broken in and made ourselves at home.
At night, I argue with Moxie about his threat models and his assumptions about phone numbers as user identifiers. “This app is going to be used by people escaping intimate violence,” I tell him. “Their abusers know their phone numbers. You need to let them in with pseudonyms.” But he insists on ensuring Signal’s address book discovery works as smooth as butter.
I don't think it's fair to say that Moxie Marlinspike ever had “anarchist leanings,” even if it feels like it's said here with a bit of tongue and cheek (but I can't tell what tone the author intended). He's always been a businessman through and through; he's never actually cared about anarchic-anything, and that's particularly obvious in the second quoted paragraph where he doesn't care about threat models or abuse.
He also kept harassing people with trying to license protocols and what have you, which doesn't feel very anarchist to me unless you only think anarchists are anarcho-capitalists (which aren't anarchists; they're just fucking tools co-opting an ideology they don't get and don't want to understand).
But in spite of the gracious sunlight, I feel a true evil on this boat with me. These men aren’t aberrations, they’re a template I’ve seen everywhere. They’re saying the same words I’d heard all week in the mansion. The same words I’d heard in the copycat San Francisco transplant coworking spaces of Melbourne, Sydney’s Silicon Beach, and Apple’s developer conferences: Violence, then rebuild; profit, then philanthropy – repeat! Different war, same business model, new interface, same shining eyes. “We’re making the world a better place.”
This is beautifully written. It's so precisely a good explanation. It'd also do well to tie in the robber baron philanthropists of the early 1900s because this is the same shit that people've been doing for decades if not centuries.
In 2015, a man named Victor Collins was found dead in James Bates’ bathtub in Bentonville, Arkansas. What might have been a routine homicide investigation became a low-key media frenzy. Bates’ home was “smart”, meaning his water, electricity, and heat were all networked. This changed everything.
Sending me down a rabbit hole because I want to know what the updates to this story are. Which include: Collins' widow suing Bates (claiming he was responsible for Collins' death since he died in Bates' house—I'm guessing that case didn't go well because I did find a 2021 appeal), and Bates suing the Bentonville PD department (claiming they colluded with Collins' wife to charge him with murder). No word on what the final verdict was with regards to how Victor Collins died; it seems once Bates had the charges dropped (and because of how absurd it was to hinge the case on an Alexa), no one really cared to... do more work to figure out what happened? (Or report on it.)
(And because it's mentioned later, I'm just dropping this link here for ease of access: Sam Mitrani: Stop Kidding Yourself: The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People.)
In case you might accuse a contemporary scholar of selective reinterpretation of history to satisfy a left-wing bias, British officials themselves explicitly compared industrial policing to colonial control methods. The Acting Lord Lieutenant of Carmarthenshire wrote to the Home Office in 1843: “there is… far more analogy between the duties of the police here and in Ireland than between their duties in London and those they are to execute in this country.”
This bit reminds me of my work in studying the history of compulsory schooling and schooling as it exists, and it's very interesting because a similar story exists for schooling. People talk about how it's good and necessary, but they ignore the why. They ignore how people who created the original systems saw it; they pretend they said something totally different or meant something more positive... because they don't want to believe that something they've held to be true or held to to be dear has been based upon a lie.
Under capitalism, successive technologies show this logic repeating as ever-accelerating epochs of Boom, Extract, Enforce.
The same can be said of schools, and it's just crazy to me how people won't look at it this way.
Each infrastructure began with promises of liberation and human triumph. But stability calcifies into compliance through legal policy, economic incentives, consolidation and embedded technical defaults.
Easy to also apply to schooling. I wonder if we could start associating schooling as a 'technology' in the way that policing is positioned as one in this essay.
Unlike other mediums, Cyberspace requires capital just to exist. No part of it is passive. A book can sit on a shelf for centuries, asking nothing of its surroundings but space. Every element of Cyberspace – electricity, hardware, supply chains, software maintenance, protocols, the network – all of it must be actively maintained by someone, somewhere, continuously, forever.
I know what the point is of this paragraph, but I find myself repeatedly nitpicking the ideas used. A book can sit on a shelf for centuries, but it does ask for more than space: It asks for electricity (for appropriate heating/cooling and humidity control so that it can survive for centuries), it asks for maintenance (cleaning of the environment it sits in), it asks for... space. And unless this book exists outside of the current capitalist structure—maybe we can talk to some librarians—that space requires capital to purchase... and then that whole space requires maintenance in order to ensure the book's safety.
Books aren't as passive as the author makes them out to be.
You cannot preserve neutrally in a medium that punishes existence without continuous capital investment.
Again, we can apply the idea to books. Which books have survived and which ones have not? Why have they survived? Why have others disappeared into the aether? Books are also not passive because the choosing of what survives centuries into the future also requires people to make decisions that are based on things that... can be harmful to us all, quite honestly.
Not to mention, in tandem with the current internet policies, we're still seeing book bans. What happens to those books?
What Lain understands – and what her father refuses to see – is that the network was never a separate or ephemeral home of Mind. It was already bleeding through Barlow’s substrate, staining everything it touched with its particular logic of connection, coercion, and control.
I think it'd be good to point out the ways in which so many people had already realised what Lain understood (that the space between online/offline is blurry and that both are real). For so long, we floundered in our own understanding because many people refused to figure this out. That which happens offline impacts online and vice versa.
This is a thing I wish more people would explore. It was also something that I wished more people would've pushed back on when someone said the internet “wasn't real” and to “just log off,” as if that fixed anything.
In October 2024, the Internet Archive is hacked. Thirty-one million accounts exposed, the Wayback Machine taken offline, the Internet’s indiscriminate memory defaced. The hackers are flesh; their target is memory; the impact is both and neither. The real reached into Cyberspace and gave it amnesia.
Okay, but this is kind of giving cover for what IA/Wayback Machine already does. Should any company ask them to take down archives, they will usually do it; I've done it myself when I didn't want a much older version of my website to remain, which means that without any hacking skills at all... I've done the same thing. Simply by asking them to do so. Imagine if they did that on services that shouldn't be allowed to do that for (like government websites).
Also, IA routinely deletes things on their own. I've had a whole account of old podcasts completely deleted without any notification at all. I don't know if it was for a malicious reason (part of a hack or because IA didn't like it on their own) or if there was a good reason. The problem with IA as an example here is that they already engage in collective shifts of memory if someone requests it, for good or bad.
Scott’s worldview distils to this: “If you don’t want people to have your data, don’t put it online.” Which is true, I guess, but it’s also what happens when the computer-science definition of memory collides with living subjects. Just because “the internet never forgets” doesn’t mean you personally should be the arbiter of immutability. This is a despicable worldview that guarantees bit-level integrity while stripping other people of their contextual agency. Scott solves for retention and calls the remainder “history.”
I very much agree with this. It's also part of what frustrates me about the self-hosting commentary people engage in. “You can control it!” Kind of. I can't control what's done with it once it's sent out to the void, and I don't know how people will weaponise it or manipulate it... Similarly, that problem would happen if I published a book or produced an album. But I still don't like the lack of engagement that people often have about what's posted.
I mean, I guess the same can be said of me going through this essay and commenting on pieces; if they wanted to delete it, parts would still be quoted here. I didn't ask for permission. Perhaps I should've, though I still want to add my thoughts with the appropriate context.