The Internet is like Quicksand

I'm a big believer in Immortality. No, not the kind where you go to heaven or Valhalla or Nirvana. I mean the kind where your works and your name outlive your body. I even believed for a while that the internet would help me get there. But every day now, with reminders from Facebook of things that I posted a year, three years or five years ago, I am forced to face my own mortality and the mortality of others on the web. Links that I posted lead to dead ends. Articles that I edited with care thinking they would be there for people to read long after I am gone, are full of holes where I linked to images instead of copying them into my own site. The internet is like quicksand!

Today, I was reminded by Facebook of an article about Mary Dolan that I published four years ago and then shared on social media three years ago. The images had all disappeared! Why? Because respecting the work that another person put into copying pages from Marie Dolan's passport onto the web, I linked to that site for the images, rather than copying them outright. Now that site is no longer there, and the only image I was able to save was the one I had copied onto Pinterest.

Mary Dolan's passport

Why? What ever happened to that thing that they told us on Hubpages: that we would get residual income forever off the work we did today? Was that all a scam?

I look at my books on Amazon, and whereas they were supposed to be just like any other books, now they are showing a delay of four days to order them. What will happen when Amazon goes bankrupt someday in the not so near future, after I am dead? Can I seriously expect that my books will not be permanently out of print?

By all means trust the internet for the short term, but in the long run, you want to have a hard copy of everything. Hardcopies outlive the publishers and the civilizations that spawned them. The internet is way too flimsy to trust our immortality to.

While my new year's resolution is to write and publish less and publicize more, I do plan to publish more of my articles and other minor contributions, so there is a hardcopy to refer to in the future, even as the internet fails us. If you want immortality, you do the same!