Memories Can’t Wait—or, How I Learned to Keep Worrying About the Web

We used to worry about fire. A house fire could claim the photo albums, the letters, the dusty box of cassette tapes in the closet. We knew exactly what we were protecting, and from what. The threat was not only visible, but olfactory: you could smell smoke. Now the threat is something else entirely: not loss through destruction, but loss through indifference. The server shuts down. The startup pivots. The platform “sunsets” a feature you’d spent years filling with memories. And just like that, a decade of your life becomes a page of 404s. The economics of attention I’ve been publishing on the web since 1995. I’ve watched links I wrote, links I cherished, slowly turn to dust. Not because the ideas were bad, or the writing was thin, but because someone decided a database was too expensive to maintain, or a domain registration lapsed, or a CMS migration “couldn’t prioritize” backward compatibility. The fragility isn’t in the medium—it’s in the economics of attention. Digital memory is…