The digital Dark Age

The October Archive.org attack shook me in a bad way. For a while now I’ve been increasingly convinced that in the not-too-distant-future we will be referring to the period of the early 21st century as a digital dark age. Not just because of the seemingly unstoppable rise of anti-intellectual, anti-science fascist movements around the world that use the internet to spread like wildfire, but also due to significant gaps in organized preservation of digital data, both public and personal. By this point we’ve seen enormous swaths of early internet go away on a whim of owners of previously significant platforms – from Geocities to MySpace. But while there have been organized efforts to collectively archive data when it comes to such large and well known services, I’m increasingly finding that significant parts of the web tend to go offline not with a bang but a whimper. And the speed of this loss seems to be increasing, seemingly in parallel with Google’s enshitification of search and the rise of halucinatingly unreliable “AI” tools that normal people are starting to use not just as replacement for search, but as a primary source itself.

While I’m primarily concerned about this phenomenon in terms of its impact on public data – information that in previous decades would have been published on paper, records, tapes or other physical media and then distributed publicly, I’m also increasingly worried about personal data. Let’s take photos for example — while folks would lose physical photographs all the time in the pre-digital times, from simply losing them in a move to experiencing catastrophe and trauma in war or a house fire, the physicality of those memories largely ensured that at least certain important pieces would get preserved through decades, and sometimes centuries. When my grandfather passed away three years ago, he left photographic evidence of his life spanning 90 years. On the other hand, I already have a digital photographic gap in my personal history. My family got our first digital camera some time around 2002. Due to a hard drive failure on my dad’s laptop, which occurred some time into that first year of digital photography, we lost a whopping 2268 digital photos taken by the Fujifilm FinePix S602 Zoom, our first digital camera. We still have lots of photos from the 90s, but there’s a noticable gap in the early 2000s, meaning that I have very few photos of me around the age of 11 and 12.

Personal history

How do I know that we lost over two thousand photos? Because the earliest digital photo I have in my personal archive is dated March 15, 2003, and it is titled DSCF2269.JPG. It was taken at CeBIT in Hannover, a technology fair my father took me to in 2003 and 2004. It shows two AIBO robot dogs, with a crowd gathered around them. I think it’s quite fitting that this is the first digital photo I have preserved, a great example of the early 2000s techno utopianism. I was 12 years old, and I still remember the excitement. I’m sure that after March 2003 we lost more digital photos, but at that point I spontaneously started preserving digital photos and videos, first those taken by our shared family digital camera, and later those taken by my own cameras and phones. I often wonder how other folks have fared in this effort. While backups and preservation have probably gotten more consistent with services like iCloud and Google Drive, outsourcing this effort to the same companies engaged in hyper enshitification and “AI” slop worries me. I’ve helped a number of friends recover photos from old phones, and I know that many of them have huge gaps in data from the 2000s. I can’t even speculate what’s going on with younger folks who grew up in the post personal computing era, some of whom seem to exist in a post file system world altogether and primarily use ephemeral social media.

But speculation and fear are not the topic of this post. Instead, I would like to document my own personal history preservation effort which I executed over the last 12 months, putting in many hours into trying to reconstruct years 2007 – 2012 of my own blog, this same blog that you are reading right now. But first, we need to establish some general history.

Early blogging era

I started my first blog in 2006. I was in high school, and I was obsessed with photography. I already had a cell phone with a camera (Nokia 3650), but I had recently gotten my first digital camera: a FujiFilm A350. I was taking tons of photos, and at some point I discovered the joys of street photography. I was quite impolite and lacked any subtlety. I was taking photos of people young and old all over Zagreb, my hometown. Blogs were hot at the time, so some time in the Fall of 2006 I started posting my photos on a local blogging service – blogger.hr. My blog was hosted at “onthe.bloger.hr”. There was no particular reason for that name, naturally. I became a very active photo blogger — I posted on there all the time. This being the “middle internet” era, I quickly made friends and started meeting up with the local photo blogging community. I was the youngest person in this group, but there didn’t seem to be anything odd to me about being a 15 year old hanging out with a bunch of 20 and 30 somethings. We were all learning how to take good photos and having a good time together. This wasn’t my first website — I had dabbled in free website services earlier, but this was the first time I maintained a consistent and continuous presence online that was actually connected to me as a person in the real world. Those were fun times — after a few months, I got featured in the free Metro newspaper. Remember when they wrote about cool websites in the newspapers?

In 2007 I decided to go independent – I left the local Croatian blogging service and I set up a WordPress blog with my own domain – mejs.org. Everything old is new again, and almost 20 years later this blog once again runs on WordPress. “mejs” is a handle I had been using since the early 2000s. I was a prolific poster on Star Wars and other adjacent science fiction message boards, so I came up with a localized moniker based on Samuel L. Jackson’s character Mace Windu. “Mejs” is the phonetic spelling of the English word “mace” in Croatian. Wasn’t the old internet great? I carried this handle from forums through blogs and Twitter, and I still use it on various services including Mastodon. I lost access to the mejs.org domain sometime in the 2010s, but I regretted it immediately. I kept an eye on it, and once the domain squatter who held it for the better part of last decade failed to renew it, I went ahead and grabbed it back. If you type in mejs.org nowadays, you’ll get to this website. But what happened to the original mejs.org?

Abandonment and regrets

I launched mejs.org in June 2007 as a single website that would host two blogs — my “photo blog” and my “text blog”. The distinction stemmed from the fact that I struggled to represent my photography in a visually appropriate way while maintaining ability to write articles on the same website. I posted A LOT. The website went through a few transformations, but by 2012 when I was already in college and living in Portland, Oregon, it was almost dead. This was for a few reasons — I was increasingly interested in different things, blogs seemed to be on their way out anyway, and last but not least I was living in a foreign country while still maintaining a website that was primarily written in a language that none of my new friends understood. I wasn’t looking back at that time — my life was changing constantly, and the same thing was happening elsewhere in the world – it seemed like something new was happening all the time. It’s funny now, looking back, how so many rigid, unchanging things that are actively harmful nowadays date to those exact years when the world seemed to be changing so quickly.

I decided to change too. I shut down my personal blog in Croatian and I opened a tumblr, redirecting the blog.vladimirvince.com domain towards it. I continued posting photos, with an occasional written post. I also used the website to present a brief biography, since professional presentation increasingly became important as I was getting closer to finishing college and diving into the life of job applications and work. Some time in this flux, I stopped paying for my hosting service, and I lost the mejs.org domain.

I did not backup the WordPress database.

Recovery

It would be years until I realized that I had no backup, and even more years until I realized that this was something I actually cared about. I slowly started doing personal digital archaeology about 5 years ago. I’ve been relatively successful in maintaining backups of my computers and servers over the years, but my web presence hadn’t been as meticulously maintained. After all, we used to be told that the internet was forever. My first attempt at restoring mejs.org was running a web crawl on the Archive.org’s backup of the website. This was surprisingly successful, and it helped establish some semblance of structure to what became a year long reconstruction effort. It wasn’t until last year, once I finally recovered the mejs.org domain, that I seriously engaged with actually recovering the full scope of my original blog, from the years 2007 and 2012 (I decided to forfeit the onthe.bloger.hr era).

I started the restoration effort while posting on Mastodon. I was browsing the Archive.org version of the blog circa 2009 and noting how good it looked. This finally prompted me to see if I could actually rebuild the whole thing. I started manually, going through the Wayback Machine archive and manually entering posts into this blog where I’m writing now. While the Wayback Machine is incredible, it’s easy to miss content published in between crawls. Sometimes there would be links that suggest a post existed on a certain date, so all I would get is a title. In other instances there’d be an archived post, but the image would be gone because it was hosted on flickr. I did have a backup of my old flickr with json files, so I could sometimes crossrefernce this to exif data and then dig out the image from my archives. This was painstaking work.

After a while I discovered an actual XML export of the database that covered content from May 2007 to March 2008! While this did not include attachments (photos being the primary content of this blog), it helped validate what I was getting from Archive.org. While the XML export was good source of truth, it is difficult to parse, so I used wordpress-export-to-markdown tool to get markdown of every post, which also pulled all media that was available online (a surprising number of photos hosted on Flickr are still available, even though they’ve been “deleted” on the account). I then ran another tool (Showdown) to convert the md files into html. Finally I went through them one by one, comparing it to my recovered archive on my current website.

But beyond the difficult restoration work, it was fascinating to see what I was up to almost 20 years ago! I posted A LOT. It was primarily photos, but I posted almost every day and sometimes multiple times a day. No wonder I embraced Twitter early. There was so much engagement in the comments! Some of it was from my friends, but a lot was from random folks who would just happen upon my blog. There were also frequent notices of travel, where I would give folks a heads up that I might not have internet access for a few days. Incredible how strange that seems now.

The XML export ended in March 2008 – just when I launched the new and improved version of mejs.org. Gone were the days of separate photo and text blogs — I was now posting everything together, on a rather standard WordPress template. I still posted a lot, but the restoration work after this point had to fully rely on the Wayback Machine. While I think I’ve managed to track down every post from this era, a decent number of them do not include photos, since I haven’t been able to identify what was originally posted.

I launched the last major revision of mejs.org in early 2009. I took yet another approach – I subtitled the blog “artistička radna organizacija”, referencing the 1980s Yugoslav New Wave compilation record Artistička radna akcija. The slightly pretentious title was meant to embrace my stated intent to expand the scope of my writing to art in general – I planned to write not just about photography, but also about film, music, books. Looking back, I certainly made an effort, writing about shows I saw or about my friends’ artistic efforts. I even engaged in a minor publicity stunt, taking the website offline for 2 weeks and then organizing a Facebook event around the re-launch of my blog. This was truly representative of me as a junior in high school, and this blog format remained the structure for mejs.org to its end in 2012.

Out of all 3 major eras of mejs.org, this one had the worst quality crawls by the Wayback Machine. Attachments were almost universally lost, and there are whole months of posts missing. I continued searching for any trace of actual backups. From my current perspective, I’m petrified at the idea that some former me just nuked years and years of writing and photography without taking a single backup between 2008 and 2012! Eventually I discovered emails with my old web hosting provider in 2011 when my wordpress was apparently hacked (I have no memory of this), and they helped me rebuild the site on another server. I found an email I sent on April 6, 2011 saying I downloaded the WordPress database. I must have used this copy to restore the blog on the new server, but despite my best efforts I never found this copy. The internet is, in fact, not forever.

One saving grace is that post 2009, my posting went down significantly. I was busy with life offline, while my posting slowly but surely moved to Twitter. This meant that even though the archive.org crawls had huge gaps, they didn’t miss all that much. My recovery effort ended up taking over a year, but by September 2024 I finally got it done. To the best of my knowledge, November 2011 is the last time I posted on mejs.org. On April 17 2012 I started posting on Tumblr using the blog.vladimirvince.com domain. Perhaps there were some posts in between those dates, but for now I’m calling this effort complete! You can find all publicly available posts in the month-by-month archive on the right hand side Archives list.

My Tumblr-as-a-website phase was relatively long. But, by September 2019 I was once again back running WordPress, and this blog hasn’t changed much in the last 5 years. Luckily, I properly migrated all the Tumblr data, so this blog hosts all the content I posted since 2012. These days I put more effort into writing than web design or formatting, and while I post only seldomly, I primarily post for myself. I am thrilled if others find my work interesting or useful, but at the end of the day, this is my web log, and I’m excited to be once again writing on it.

Conclusion

So what did I learn? Restoring my old blog was a strange experience. I’ve spent a lot of time in recent years looking back. For me, so much of looking back is thinking about the world before the pandemic, but this restoration effort primarily placed me in my late teens and, crucially, into my life before I lived in America. Reading my own words from that time, in a language I no longer speak out loud every day, is both fascinating and somewhat distressing. Some of this is, I presume, normal for a person getting close to middle age. I started this post reminiscing about photography, and the challenges of preserving personal digital archives. I never wrote a diary with any consistency, but my blog is a unique insight into my life and my mind in my formative years. Later on, Twitter would take that role for me, but I’m content with limiting the scope of the public Twitter archive I maintain. Not every thought needs to be preserved online for all to see.

Perhaps more than anything, this process made me appreciate the immense, colossal importance and value of the Internet Archive. It is as much an integral part of our common human information infrastructure as the Wikipedia, and experiencing life without the ability to browse the Wayback Machine or access some archived books for a few days was literally terrifying. Writing this days before yet another election where a fascist is threatening to dismantle what remains of American democracy, and in the middle of the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, the stakes of information preservation are so much higher than the silly personal history restoration I wrote about here. While there are so many more actions we should all be taking to resist fascism, regularly donating to the Archive.org is one of the things I will be doing from now on.