Tom Scocca – Indignity: “The Archive Is the Thing That’s Worth Browsing Now. I was trying to find a lost article on the internet. It had been published 14 years ago on a website that stopped updating 5 years ago and had bounced between different platforms during its existence. Somewhere along the way, something broke, and the original URL led to a 404 error page.So I went to the Internet Archive, pasted the URL into the Wayback Machine, and clicked on an early snapshot of the page There, through a slightly janky aperture, was the story I was looking for.  A day or two earlier, I’d been looking up an online video game I’d previously written about. I’d published the item five years ago, with a link to the game, but now that link brought up a frowny-face page logo in Chrome with a “DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN” message. Through the Wayback Machine, though, it was still playable, albeit with a dead zone for steering where the top edge of the game neared the Wayback Machine frame. The Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine have been helping people do these sorts of things for a long time…Link rot and the general instability of the publishing and hosting businesses—and of their underlying tech—have always been breaking down the pieces of the internet, even as the internet kept expanding. Whenever you stumble over one of the resulting gaps, you can more often than not fill it in with the Internet Archive’s snapshot of what used to be there. But what happens when the entire internet is one big series of gaps? The information system everyone has relied on all these years seems to be caught up in a transition from “constantly breaking” to just “broken.” The current platforms are either unusable or on their way to unusability, caught up in their individual yet identical cycles of what Cory Doctorow diagnosed as “enshittification“…