Several luminaries of internet architecture have recently had some sharp and needful words regarding the restrictive environment that governments and businesses are cultivating. Current conditions certainly would not have fostered free-exchange, creativity and innovation and the internet, in terms of content and scope could not have developed as it had. Increasingly aggressive policies are being reinvented and re-flagged under different names but with the same unsavoury and prying aims. That assault and invasion is awful enough, but critics are also right to broach the trend towards compartmentalization.
Like some medieval scriptorium, a lot of information, news and culture meant also for the broader public is being concentrated by aggregators into isolated platforms that are card-catalogues that are at most offering a tantalizing abstract or a bit of nosiness. In the tradition of antique librarians, this inventory, cultivated and expansive as an almanac or chronology, is jealously guarded, and though bidden by the same hosts, come with a caveat of conformity and house-rules. Increasingly, whatever is shared behind the arras of social-networks and networking-applications is really being shunted down a memory-hole, perhaps not forgotten but verging towards inaccessible, like video and cassette tapes and other obsolete forms of coding. What treasures and histories, discoverable but undiscovered, are relegated to film, floppy disks and format? Or even hidden in the shipwrecks of faded enterprises—like mySpace and other groups? Cultural heritage, when and where it can be shared ought not be sequestered or offered up to a repository—especially one whose conditions and conduct are not transparent. Patience and native-curiosity may save what’s in the stacks, physical archives, basements, attics and junk-drawers from oblivion, but as more and more research is confined to digital media and what’s readily accessible, I do not think humans are very backwards-compatible. 
