I use software as a creative instrument: in workflows, publications, client systems, and in all the quiet machinery that keeps institutions pulsing through connected ideas. I've now lived through two platform shifts up-close: the dawn of the consumer internet and the explosion of Web 2.0's networked creativity. The lesson that stuck is simple: the most exciting tools are rarely the safest place to store your work.
All that work was published online, too. But with several changes in the content management system in the 26 years since I started at the St. Joseph (Missouri) News-Press, only four of those stories still live on that newsroom's site. I've reported on journalists have to do to save their own digital archives for years. And I've always thought of it more as an individual issue.
The Atlantic launched its website in November 1995, 138 years after it first went into print. The magazine began in response to one information revolution; the website appeared at the dawn of another. Now, 30 years on from the launch, you can buy a copy of the first printed edition of the magazine on eBay, but you can't find much of the original website. The internet, notable for remembering just about everything, seems to have forgotten that particular piece of its own history.
It's a question David Ewalt, Scientific American's editor in chief, was tasked with tackling long ago, where he was forced to look at memory, human connection and technology in a way that asked deeper questions about how we preserve information in the digital age and what it means to come into contact with our past selves. Hi, David. David Ewalt: Hi, it's nice to join you.
As TechCrunch reports, the rebooted platform, dubbed diVine, will include over 100,000 archived videos from the platform, likely only a small fraction of the platform's original database. Vine had over 200 million active monthly users in its heyday ten years ago, but was shut down in 2016. But the reboot has a hidden ace up its sleeve: AI-generated content is banned outright, and any suspected use of AI will be flagged and prevented from being posted - a panacea for an internet that's been overrun with lazy AI slop.
"Obviously, Suzanne was greatly loved, not only by her family, but by millions of people," he said. "One of the projects that we have coming up is a really interesting project, the Suzanne AI Twin."
