Between Alexandria and the Feed: On Memory, Forgetting, and the Internet
Between Alexandria and the Feed: On Memory, Forgetting, and the Internet
The Library of Alexandria may have been the first systematic attempt by humanity to centralize the knowledge of the known world. Founded in the third century BCE, within the Hellenistic context of Ptolemaic Egypt, its project was ambitious: to gather all possible texts—philosophy, science, poetry, mathematics, medicine, politics—regardless of their cultural or linguistic origin.
Ships arriving in Alexandria had their books confiscated, copied, and archived. The originals were often not returned. The objective was clear: to retain memory, to build a repository capable of surviving time and political disputes. The Library was not merely a storehouse of texts, but a living center of translation, commentary, and intellectual production.
Yet this accumulated knowledge did not reach the present day. The destruction, or rather, the successive destructions over the course of centuries, interrupted entire lineages of thought. Works cited by ancient authors vanished without leaving a trace. Scientific hypotheses, historical narratives, and philosophical schools were erased not by refutation, but by material absence.
Alexandria thus became a lasting symbol of an uncomfortable truth: knowledge without an infrastructure of permanence is always vulnerable.
The Modern Illusion of the Internet
For centuries, humanity sought to mitigate this fragility through new technologies of record-keeping: codices, the printing press, national archives, modern libraries. Each advance seemed to reduce the risk of forgetting. The internet, finally, emerged as the definitive promise: everything could be stored, copied, distributed, and accessed globally.
But this promise carries a structural contradiction.
Most of the contemporary internet was not built as an archive, but as a flow. Digital platforms are oriented toward attention metrics, engagement cycles, and business models that privilege the immediate present. Content exists as long as it is useful, profitable, or compatible with internal policies. Then it disappears.
The reality is that much of what circulates on the internet is lost over time. Links break, domains expire, servers are shut down. The internet leads us to confuse momentary availability with historical permanence. The fact that something is online today creates the illusion that it will remain accessible tomorrow. Yet the dominant web assumes no temporal responsibility for what it hosts.
Intention, Technique, and Temporality
Every technical infrastructure embodies an implicit philosophy. There is no neutrality in the way data is stored, distributed, or erased. When a network is designed for speed and monetization, it produces obsolescence. When it is designed for preservation, it produces memory.
The central question is not merely where data is stored, but under what conditions it exists.
A truly permanent internet requires a paradigm shift: a move from the logic of disposable content to the logic of the archive, breaking dependence on platforms and advancing toward the autonomy of memory.
Without such a shift, the fate of contemporary intellectual production will not be very different from that of Alexandria: vast, creative—and largely lost.
Arweave and the Reconfiguration of Digital Memory
It is at this point that the Arweave protocol introduces a relevant conceptual rupture. Unlike traditional cloud systems, based on recurring subscriptions and centralized control, Arweave is designed around a simple and radical premise: data should be stored permanently.
The technical model, a single payment for indefinite storage, is not merely an economic innovation, but a philosophical statement. It shifts responsibility for memory away from continuous financial cycles and toward a logic of historical commitment. Once recorded, content no longer depends on the survival of a specific company, a platform, or a future monetization model.
This profoundly alters the relationship between knowledge and time.
On Arweave, a text, an artwork, or a scientific record does not exist to perform in the feed. It exists to remain accessible, regardless of transformations in the digital ecosystem. This is less about storage and more about the institutionalization of memory within a decentralized environment.
Between Alexandria and the Present
The comparison with Alexandria is not merely symbolic. The crucial difference is that today the disappearance of knowledge does not occur through visible fires, but through silent erasures. Loss unfolds gradually, normalized, distributed across millions of broken links and removed contents.
The illusion of the contemporary internet is to make us believe that everything is saved, when in reality almost nothing is guaranteed.
The idea of a permanent internet does not solve all the problems of human memory. But it points toward a necessary correction: recognizing that preserving knowledge requires technical choices aligned with historical responsibility.
Alexandria taught us the irreversible cost of loss. The internet offers us, for the first time, the chance to learn before total collapse. The question is not whether we need permanent memory, history has already answered that. The question is whether we will be capable of sustaining it within a culture accustomed to rapid forgetting.
