Google and Our Collective Memory

Vass Bednar, the Walrus: […] the point has been made: looking after the information economy can no longer be a side project for underfunded institutions. Wikipedia is as miraculous as the Wayback Machine is indispensable. Still, we need to stop pretending volunteerism alone can hold up the public internet. We understand this duty more clearly in other domains. After all, roads aren’t governed by ride-sharing companies; payment apps don’t set monetary policy; cloud service providers don’t dictate national security frameworks (at least not yet). Yet we have been shockingly casual about governing our digital dependencies. This paragraph is fantastic. But one of the things I found frustrating about this article as a whole is the lack of links or substantial proof. For example, I felt compelled to fact-check this claim: The retrieval crisis has reached even Wikipedia, one of the world’s most significant volunteer-run public knowledge resources. For years, search engines sent billions of…