Picking up the thread from the discussion about the ?[? maybe? we need no control chars. Need plain content. Let's draft carefully.
First, I should say this clearly: the idea of a graveyard for digital information, especially blogs, may already have crossed other people’s minds, and I do have some thoughts about it myself. But I’m not attached to my own version of the idea. What I want is to throw it out there and let someone with the right ability actually build it. If you can finish it, please let me know afterward. I really do like the starting point of this project.
I’ve spent a lot of time looking at blog circles and blogging alliances where people gather for all kinds of reasons, standards, feelings, and ambitions. What I’m especially drawn to, though, is the “graveyard zone” — the places where I go looking for blogs that are already dead. Sometimes a site is gone because the server expired. Sometimes it was shut down because it never got the right registration. Sometimes it has simply disappeared. And sometimes it is still technically alive, but only in the way a body is alive after the soul has left.
Reading the last post on one of those “dead” blogs is, to me, strangely fascinating. Even if it is only imagination, I always end up constructing a complete story in my head by combining the reason the blog was abandoned with the content of its final entry.
There are plenty of people who stopped updating because of a breakup. Some wrote a monthly recap, made a long list of promises and hopes, and then never came back to report what happened next. Some slowed down gradually after getting married or having children. Others moved to another city, and after that, there was no more glimpse of what their new life looked like.
When I make up these stories, I still hold on to one rule: people who are happy usually do not blog very diligently, because they spend more time actually enjoying life. Saying that sounds a little weak coming from me, since I write almost every day. But life still has to go on. For me, writing is nothing more than something I do in the two hours after making tea in the morning, before the tea has even gone cold — sometimes after thinking hard, sometimes without thinking much at all, and sometimes while being too lazy to think properly. The point is to keep the brain working, or at least prevent it from rusting, even if that sounds contradictory.
A blog may go quiet for all kinds of reasons, but the ending is often the same: one day, it disappears completely. And the disappearance of digital information feels even more ruthless. It vanishes from the internet, a place you can’t touch, and nothing is left behind. In the end, it gets reduced to a single label: 404. Thinking about that is heartbreaking. Of course, some of what disappears may be a person’s private embarrassment or bad history, but if people were allowed to control what remains, then the things worth keeping should absolutely have somewhere to live.
If there are already people doing the work of keeping “living” blogs going, why shouldn’t there be people doing business around the “dead” ones too? I call it a business, but what I really mean is this: preserving a dead blog, or keeping a blog alive after its owner has passed away, is a real need. And whenever there is a real need, it can be described as a business.
ShangHai @ono
The Deceased Blogger Blog Custody Agreement is not a joke. It is something I am genuinely planning, even though, at the moment, it would only apply to myself. When I stop updating my blog, whether willingly or not, and I still want it preserved, I will need someone who can keep it running for me.
At that point, operation is no longer the main issue. What matters is survival and maintenance. I also mentioned before that a deceased blogger’s site can, in fact, continue to operate, but that requires a certain amount of ability from the person maintaining it. For example:
- they need to understand the original blogger’s way of thinking and their angle of perception;
- if the writing style has to change, there should be a natural bridge for that shift, like someone going through a breakup and suddenly becoming a very different person, with the writing tone changing along with it;
- the original owner can prepare content in advance and have it published on schedule according to the agreement.
There is another kind of “death” for a blog, and that is a concept I’ve been thinking about as well. Could there be a blog cemetery, a place that keeps the last traces of a blog’s face and voice before it disappeared? That would be a reverse kind of agreement:
- the blogger could set an exact “time of death” for the blog, such as the domain expiring or the server running out;
- the blogger could also define the logic for declaring death, for example if the blog has not been updated for half a year or a year, it would be treated as deceased and handed to a platform for safekeeping or archiving;
- a blogger could also preserve someone else’s blog by signing the custody agreement mentioned above, with a friend from the blogroll or even a family member acting as the custodian.
The preservation method itself is actually very simple. A system could crawl the homepage once a day or take a screenshot every day. On the day it detects a 404, the last saved version or screenshot becomes that blog’s tombstone and is placed in the cemetery.
The blogger could write down the reason for leaving, or leave the epitaph blank so that others can guess. It could be a place for remembrance, or a place for recollection. It could work like a time capsule waiting to be opened one day in the future, or something buried in the long river of time and eventually forgotten even by its owner.
Digital information is so abundant, so messy, that people stop realizing it should be cherished. We are no longer in the age of paper records. Information made from numbers and code is a paradox in itself: it can be real, yet in one night it can be declared false. It can preserve what a person thinks, yet it can also be altered or stolen by someone else. When everyone’s information becomes false, it all somehow turns true. When everyone’s thoughts are treated as true, they eventually all become false. That is probably the deeper reason I want to propose a blog cemetery. I want this era to build a cemetery for digital information:
Everyone can be forgotten. Everyone also deserves to be remembered.
For now, there is already one such digital memorial in China: the Weibo account @xiaolwl of Dr. Li Wenliang, the COVID-19 whistleblower who died in 2020. It is also known as the “Great Firewall crying wall.” But under the absurd way things work today, who knows? Someday even that place may be blocked and forgotten too.