The To-Be-Forgotten

 We all recall when ABC killed the polling aggregator and political analysis site FiveThirtyEight last year—in a move they described as a business decision at the time, but which seemed eerily to coincide with the general trend of the "Great Accomodation" during the early months of the Trump administration. 

Now, having already died once, the website appears set to undergo what Thomas Hardy called the "second death"—that of "oblivion." Even after it stopped generating new content, after all, FiveThirtyEight lingered on as a searchable archive. People could at least link back to old articles. Now, that too appears to be gone. 

"All the work that’s been done, you know, groundbreaking work covering this remarkable period in American politics, is lost," one of its former journalists reportedly told the New York Times; "It’s really depressing." (Though I have to ask—have they tried the Wayback Machine?)

This is a personal nightmare of mine. I remember at my job when they started taking down my old blog posts from prior years. It seemed such a waste. Why eliminate our own historical record of our existence? What does it cost us to maintain a few extra html webpages on the server in case someone finds them useful? 

Back in the early days of the internet, there was some short-lived belief that computers might help us solve the problem of manuscripts that could be burnt, stolen, or lost. Now, it looks increasingly like Nicholson Baker was right: paper is better. Websites are proving to be even more ephemeral—unless you make a point of archiving them. 

Now, how many "mute, inglorious Miltons" will remain forever erased because we did not bother to preserve written content on the internet? How many a flower of online prose will "blush unseen / And waste its sweetness on the desert air"? (Gray). 

But then again—does anything created have to endure forever in order to count? Or can an ephemeral work still be allowed a kind of existence sub specie aeternitatis? Perhaps, as Wordsworth put it, all those lost blog pages "having been must ever be." Perhaps, as MacLeish put it, "They also live / Who swerve and vanish in the river."