Metadata#
- Author(s): Ian Milligan
- Number of pages: 208
- Year published: 2024
- Year read: 2025
Review#
Note: Available for free on the publisher’s website. I have no idea how I found this book (probably my self-hosted RSS feed or Mastodon or other nerd worlds) but I’m so glad I did.
Pretty fabulous. This reads a bit like a very well-written PhD dissertation, or academic textbook. It’s a pretty niche topic - memory work (archiving) in the context of the World Wide Web - but it scratched a very specific itch I was having about my own data, scattered as it is among Big Tech’s platforms. The author actually notes this in the book’s conclusion: that the “digital dark age” remains a bogeyman for many in tech, even though the structures are now in place that it’s basically impossible (barring a “nondigital dark age” happening as well). The real risks, instead, are individual “dark ages”: e.g. Google Photos basically becoming your memory landlord that you rent the right to your pictures from. Horror of horrors!!!
Anyway, this was a wonderfully rich history of the early web - we spend a lot of time in the 90s and early 00s. I love social histories of technology. SO MUCH. There are chapters on the Internet Archive and the various archival strategies used by different national libraries (Canada, Sweden, Australia, the US). Libraries are SO COOL. I’m excited to read more about this work. Anyway, the Internet Archive and these libraries are the spine of digital archiving - I learned a lot about Brewster Kahle and Heritrix and just, like, internet stuff. Early web stuff is so interesting. And a good reminder that we are still grappling with all the usual dramas, WHILE ALSO experiencing interesting changes (web 2.0! and now the totally justifiable and I am 100% on-board backlash against Big Tech). Who knew networking computers could be so interesting and such drama.
Very similar to Finn Brunton’s Spam, another terrific book about internet stuff.