the term itself is fascinating. there is nothing natural or organic about a hyperlink, i've never seen anyone call a working link alive, and yet a broken link is dead and links becoming broken over time is rot. the breaking of a link can, depending on the context, be frustrating, tragic, amusing; this it has in common with the more conventional kind of death. but we recognize that to live is to one day die, and there may be no justice in when or how but no justice can be asked of if. we will not last forever; why should our work? decay exists as an extant form of life, as they say. that iconic post itself doesn't exist anymore, it seems; we keep it alive through active preservation, and if it outlasts all its authors it will be because so many people found it compelling. a former drama youtuber recently removed several of his toxic edgelord videos, and of course they're not gone (and the links themselves may still work, i don't care enough to check) but it's good that he can do at least that much to clean up the cultural mess he helped make. maybe the fact that links can rot is a good thing, actually. may the worst of all our links rot before we do.
but of course, there's a spectrum, and just because the median tumblr post or youtube video deserves ephemerality doesn't mean there's nothing to be said for permanence. if we really could recover dinosaur DNA from mosquitoes trapped in amber, that could be very neat as long as we didn't do anything unwise afterwards. there's always nonprofits volunteering to be the metaphorical amber, but it takes a lot of money to remember everything for all of time, and they have an unfortunate tendency to also use that money to pick losing fights with big industries and get into Web 3.0, plus you only need them after the link has already rotted, so the simplest solution would be for links to just always keep working. the issue with that is that internet domains are like real estate in that you can only ever rent, and if you don't pay then someone else will so goodbye. i've had several domains lapse and immediately be squatted, especially later in grad school when $20 was a silly amount of money to waste to preserve the domain for a side project i'd long since given up on. links rot because domains expire, and one of the reasons domains expire is that someone else will pay for them if you won't, therefore, if you want to get rid of link rot, you absolutely have to get rid of capitalism.
computers really are a land of contrasts, huh.
