For the past two years, my bio in The Retrograde’s Slack has read, “The Internet never forgets! The internet guy does, though. DM me if there’s a problem with the site.” This is half true: the internet guy does, in fact, often forget. But the thing is, so does the internet.
As a quick overview, the internet is essentially a self-weaving web that’s very good at connecting point A to point B. When you clicked to this page, your computer — point A, sent off a message intended for the server where the article is stored — point B. That message got passed around through a series of machines going “I know a guy” until it reached point B, at which the same process happened in reverse. Now you can read this. Yay! For a better explanation, go take CS4390, but this is accurate enough for now.
When we say “The internet never forgets,” the idea is that there will always be some part of the web with the information or data you’re looking for. It might not always be in the same place it was originally, but the idea is it will always be somewhere on the web.
This is true for a lot of information. Take Janet Jackson, for example. As the story goes, her wardrobe malfunction at the 2004 Super Bowl gave some young men in Silicon Valley a brilliant idea: what if that clip could be found easily by everyone on the internet forever? They founded YouTube a year later. That moment will never be fully scrubbed from the internet — even if YouTube disappeared tomorrow, it’s been copied down elsewhere.
But not every piece of information on the internet is as preserved. Take Isabel Fall’s “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter,” which explored the intersection of gender and government in a really interesting way. The short story was originally published by Clarksworld, a science fiction magazine, and was quickly removed at the request of the author after she received a barrage of harassment from people who largely hadn’t read the piece and assumed it was transphobic. This piece is available at time of writing, but for years it was impossible to find on the internet.
In this, I would be remiss to not mention the link between the internet and minority communities, the queer community especially. The internet has long served as a place where people can share information and explore their identities more safely than they can in real life. The internet can be a genuinely life-saving outlet for queer people. But for as long as there has been an internet with queer people, there has been an effort to censor queer information and expression. Many images, blogs, stories, and the like have been lost forever to the internet. This is a gross epistemic injustice.
Fall’s story is different in that she requested the work be taken down, where most censorship is done to people. Her story still fits here. The same social forces that want to censor the internet certainly haven’t encouraged her to write since, and the people harassing her to take it down share the impulse that things they don’t agree with (or predict from title alone that they wouldn’t agree with) shouldn’t have a home on the digital map. It’s an impulse we all stand to interrogate.
As a final, more personal note, take some of the work of my former employer. Before I was web editor of The Retrograde, I was web editor over at The Mercury. The story of our 2024 strike is an interesting one, but sadly this is my sendoff, so I’m going to regale you with the web version of it.
In what was likely a response to no one in the UTD’s IT department being able to safely undo the security measures they asked me to put on the Mercury website when I was a web editor, the last six articles we published before the strike were nuked from the website. Those articles existed on the Internet Archive, but were completely absent from their original publisher. They returned to the Mercury website only after we republished them on our own site. The school’s Student Media then switched over to SNO — a headache-inducing publishing platform that costs $5,000 of your student fee dollars a year — in what I assume was an effort to establish more control over the websites.
In the process of switching over to SNO, more information was lost. The crediting system — already shaky from years of web editors trying to improve the website without making anything back-compatible — became even less manageable if you were looking at anything over a year old. Somewhere in this process, UTD administration stopped paying for an Issuu page that archived all the old print editions, and a lot of information was lost. I don’t believe there was intentional malice in this. I do, however, believe that people forcefully took the power to oversee the preservation of information and failed because they didn’t know what they were doing. I find the latter to be much more frustrating.
I’ve spent the past 8 years of my life in student media and the past 4 years studying computer science. My years devoted to each have been in pursuit of the same thing: I think the way information travels is cool. I’ve been incredibly honored to be a part of The Retrograde’s journey as web editor and helping to spread information on campus. And yes, I am contractually obligated to word that in the dorkiest way possible. But if the two experiences have taught me anything, it’s that information is fleeting. The internet is not a perfect archivist. If you want knowledge, if you want history, you have to claim it as your own while it’s available. Then you have to pass it on, lest everything you know die with you.
— Rainier Pederson
P.S. In all my yapping about all the web stuff, I don’t want to pretend in any way shape or form that I did this all alone — I had a wonderful team whom I love dearly. In particular, I owe a lot to my dear assistant Muaaz Abed. He also wrote a sendoff and, in his one serious Retrograde graphic, surpassed everything I’ve done as an artist in the past 4 years. Go check that nerd’s stuff out.