Tuesday, 23 June 2026

404 (13. 548)

Having had the tragic but increasing common experience of clicking on a dead link, most recently the personal webpage of evolutionary biologist and science historian Stephen Jay Gould to find it appropriated by gambling company, the sort that is guaranteed to give one’s computer a venereal disease—we were brought up on the belief (of stranger-danger and) that the internet is forever when it turns out it’s very ephemeral and there are old, moribund sites I don’t dare click to avoid the inevitable heartbreak—and I’d much prefer it to be broken or have succumbed to the usual dilapidation of linkrot, we appreciated the referral courtesy of Tedium to this Wisconsin death trip, deathwatch vigil, a project that ironically looks abandoned as well, called RIPSO, a digital graveyard with obituaries. Wings of the catacombs that date back to the 1980s mostly entomb discontinued services, platforms and messengers, apps rather than outlets and websites (maybe impossible to catalogue), but gives a sense of what’s died the death (with indignities or otherwise—with or without resuscitation notices) and stresses the importance of the work that archivists do.