Continued from previous comment. Translated bt DeepL free web version.

5

If something is important to us and it is dying, is there anything we can do to save it?

Some people have made such an attempt. In the United States, there is a website called "Internet Archive", which is translated into Chinese as "互联网档案馆", and it has preserved a lot of original web pages. But I have tried, the original Chinese web pages, save very little, and the use of very troublesome, search function is very primitive and inefficient, and did not save almost.

From a technical point of view, to save all the web pages from China's Internet to the rise of the mobile Internet in the past ten years or so, it should not be difficult, the cost is not high, after all, compared to the current video era, the original Internet pages of those graphics, occupying a space that is almost negligible.

The question is, who is going to do it, and what is the motivation?

Commercial organizations won't do it. Because there is no commercial interest.

The government might be able to build an archive that preserves all the web pages, just like a library or a museum. But why would the government spend the money and effort to do this? There seems to be no reason other than preserving history. Besides, even if the Government did this, it would not make any sense to ordinary Internet users because this archive would certainly require certain log-in privileges to avoid misuse of information.

Moreover, even if an organization is willing to do this, it is too late now. After the rise of the mobile Internet, the Chinese content of the traditional Internet has almost disappeared. By rough estimation, more than 99% of it should be gone.

In a sense, the series of articles written by Hejiayan has also contributed to the preservation of the history of the existence of these cow people. If I hadn't written about them, a lot of that history would have been lost online. But after all, this is not the original information, it is only the second-hand information that I have consolidated.

Nowadays, on the Chinese Internet, all the major events that happened in the first decade of this century, all the celebrities who have left deep traces, the information that can still be found is almost all the second-hand information edited by the self-media, or even information that has been passed on many times, and has long been completely changed.

The original reports about them are gone, the original videos are gone, the original speeches are gone, the original netizen sightings are gone, the original comments are gone ......

In some years, all this second-hand and N-hand information, too, will be gone. It's as if those events never happened and those people never existed.

There is nothing more we can do but accept the reality.

In the future Internet era, looking back at the first twenty years of the 21st century will be twenty years without historical records.

We are the disappearing generation of the Internet age.

If you can still see some ancient information of Chinese Internet now, it is just the last afterglow of the sunset.

If you understand their fleeting nature, you may sigh like Faust on his deathbed:

You're so beautiful, please linger.

But that afterglow will soon be swallowed up by the two-way foil of time and fall into the void, along with your exclamation.

In Three Bodies, Cheng Xin and Ai AA are still lucky enough to escape the two-dimensionalizing solar system in the only curvature ship they have.

We, on the other hand, don't even have a curvature ship.

There is no escape.

Almost everything you see and create now, along with this article, this platform, will eventually drown in the void as well.

End

PS: Follow He Plus Salt and check out this public number for previous cowriter articles, and maybe you'll see a lot of information that has disappeared elsewhere. I will also continue to work hard to continue to write good cattleman stories, and strive to retain as much light as possible in the afterglow of the setting sun.

(Translated using DeepL free version)