Companies pivot or vanish, links rot, and what remains is often incomplete, stripped of context, or locked behind whatever proprietary wall still happens to be standing—this is the ordinary condition of the present network, the quiet digital dark age we all already inhabit.
Yet it does not have to continue. The data itself can carry enough integrity, provenance, and structure that it survives the death of any particular host; independent nodes can hold the same objects, verify them, and keep serving them without needing permission from a single authority. When one system disappears, the data does not disappear with it. Movement across the network stops being a risk and becomes a form of reinforcement.
I build and maintain software, research technologies, protocols, and formats, and from time to time write about the future of the internet and other stuff: