ReadMultiplex.com: Nearly 40% of Webpages That Existed in 2013 Are Just Gone. AI was trained mostly on the parts of the internet that were easy to monetize..

They used to say the Internet never forgets. This was a neive lie. It is being erased by negligence and on purpose. Dead Internet Theory Was Not a Prophecy. It Was an Early Warning We Mostly Ignored. Now We Are Raising the Amnesia Generation. The truth is paywalled and the lies are free. Most of the Internet is already gone and some it was the highest quality, high protein data. What is left is a high percentage of only the junk, nihilist, intellectually empty postings on social media, I call Internet sewage. But the beautiful long thought, deep thinking ideas and insight of this epoch built on ephemeral electrons and photons disappears without even the dust old books will decay to. This high protein data was not valued by the version 2 of the Web that favored algorithms, short performative quips, so it decayed to not even a pst memory. We are forgetting fast and we are losing our actual minds without the elder’s revering wisdom and stories unheard as we atomize into our separate cocoons of AI regulated asylums.Picture this scene. You sit down to understand how ordinary people actually felt during the first two decades of widespread internet use. You want to know what it was like when the network still felt new and open, when strangers argued late into the night about meaning, technology, politics, and whether any of it mattered. You search for the threads, the videos, the personal sites, and the comment sections where real voices spoke without the later layers of performance and optimization. Many of those records are simply gone. Some were deleted during platform changes. Others disappeared when companies decided old content no longer served current business goals. Still more faded through ordinary neglect as domains expired or servers were repurposed. What remains is often incomplete, stripped of surrounding context, or buried under newer layers that were never meant to last.This is not a distant risk. It is happening now. The Internet Archive’s 2026 book Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record lays out the evidence in clear detail. It shows how the shift from physical ownership to temporary digital access, combined with corporate decisions, technical obsolescence, and insufficient public investment in preservation, is creating permanent gaps in our shared memory. The report does not claim every piece of early digital culture was profound. It shows that the full range of human expression from that period, the polished and the raw, the commercial and the personal, is at risk of being lost in ways that earlier analog archiving efforts largely avoided.Read more at: ReadMultiplex.comSupport this work by buying us a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/brianroemmele