The Internet Forgets

In November 2025 the confirmation arrived: the Instagram account I'd asked to delete was scheduled for permanent removal. Once the process begins, you won't be able to reactivate or retrieve anything, including content you created.

I let it go.

At its peak the page had over eleven thousand followers — years of posts about music, memory, personal history, assembled one record at a time. The writing survived; I'd drafted every post locally before publishing, out of an old habit. What didn't survive was everything around it: the comments, the conversations, the friendships, the ambient sense of other people's lives. The posts are files on a drive now, stripped of the layer that gave them meaning.

I don't regret it. But I've kept thinking about what it means that so much of what I made in one stretch of my life existed only inside a walled garden I chose to abandon — and what that says about outsourcing the infrastructure of memory to companies that keep nothing they aren't paid to keep.

I first used the internet in the late 1990s, when a single file might take hours to arrive. That scarcity left a habit that would matter decades later: I kept local copies of everything, backed things up obsessively, treated digital media as something to preserve rather than summon on demand.

By 2003 I was making electronic music of my own and releasing it into the net-label scene — a web of independent labels distributing experimental work as free downloads, held together by forums, IRC channels, and personal sites. Over the following decade I played festivals and shared stages with artists I admired. Almost all of it was documented in exactly the kind of small, specialised places that don't last.

Sometime in the early 2010s I stopped maintaining my own website — no new projects, the gravitational pull of social media, the sense that a personal site had become slightly eccentric, like keeping a fax machine. By the time I moved to Lisbon I'd stopped making music altogether.

The Instagram page came later, almost by accident: I found the vinyl community there and realised I could use it like a blog — a record from the collection, and something written about it. The writing was personal; I made friends, travelled to dig for records with people I'd met through it. Over a few years it became a body of work.

Then the platform began asking for more of it back. The feed turned algorithmic; stories and reels arrived; the writing started to matter less than how it performed. And the worst of it wasn't the platform — it was me. I'd begun writing for the numbers, checking them, letting them tell me whether a day had gone well. That's when I knew I had to go. I stepped away in 2019, looked in briefly during the pandemic, and eventually deleted the whole thing.

When I set out to rebuild the website — a proper archive of everything since 2003 — I found out how much was already gone.

The music blogs that had covered my releases — careful, specialised writing by people who understood the scene — had simply ceased to exist. The Wayback Machine held fragments, never the page I needed. The gaps started around 2012 and widened from there. The large publications kept their archives, but mainstream coverage of experimental music is thin by definition; the richest documentation had come from the smallest sources, which are precisely the ones that disappear.

So I became a detective of my own past. Old email turned out to be the best evidence — confirmation threads with promoters, logistics that happened to name a date. Last.fm had show listings that existed nowhere else. Photo metadata became a source of truth: when a festival's site placed a performance in 2009, the EXIF on a backstage photo proved it was 2008.

Something came back to me in the reconstruction that I hadn't expected. Piecing the timeline together by hand — remembering contexts I'd let go of, holding two decades in sequence for the first time — I recognised a continuity I'd never quite felt while living inside it. Had it all been a click away, I'd have assembled it mechanically and never really looked. The difficulty was the thing that made me look.

But the same reconstruction kept showing me the edges of what couldn't be recovered. I'd spent years building a substantial archive of my relationship with other people's music inside a platform I would abandon, while the record of my own work quietly eroded across the open web. And when I went to credit the collaborators — musicians, designers, the people who'd made the artwork over the years — most of them had no presence outside social media at all. Unless you're established, the only trace of your work sits behind a login. My archive was becoming an island.

None of this is unique to the margins. Recently, in a community of Nine Inch Nails fans, a small panic: The Fragile, a major album from 1999, had vanished from Spotify. Confusion first, then something closer to unease — for a certain generation there's no frame of reference for it, no memory of a shop selling its last copy. The album came back; these disappearances usually do. But if it can happen to a major band with institutional backing and millions of listeners, what chance does an experimental release from a defunct net label have? Or the criticism that once gave it context? Or anything that lives only inside a company's walls?

The gaps will stay gaps. I can't resurrect the blogs, or reach an events page someone deleted a decade ago, or find the collaborators the web has already closed over. What I can do is smaller than I'd like: keep what I can still verify, somewhere I control, for as long as I'm the one keeping it.

The internet forgets — constantly, unevenly, without ceremony — and in time it will forget this too, the way it forgot everything before it. What lasts is only what someone keeps choosing to carry, and everyone, eventually, stops.

So the archive isn't a monument; it's a candle in a draught. Incomplete, already thinning at the edges, mine only as long as I tend it. I keep it anyway — not because it will last, but because the alternative is to agree, in advance, that none of it happened.