The Internet Has a Memory Problem?

“We built an internet that remembers everything, but forgets everyone.” (Wendy Hui Kyong Chun)

You can still find a tweet from 2009, dig up an old YouTube comment or resurface a long-deleted photo from a forgotten server. And we take this as proof that the internet remembers.

But try accessing an account you created six years ago. Try recovering credentials from a service that no longer exists. Try proving who you are across platforms that were never designed to speak to each other. You’ll find that the web is not really structured to remember you — only the residue of your activity.

Systems Designed to Forget You

In her work on digital systems, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun draws a distinction between memory and presence. The internet, she argues, “remembers” by circulating fragments  - data points, search results, metrics  - but forgets the human continuity behind them. Memory becomes performance and presence becomes conditional. We accept this quietly. Most of us live online as if permanence were guaranteed. We assume our data is enough to prove our existence.

The modern internet is a network of temporary permissions. Your identity is a string of logins, handles, device fingerprints, and loosely linked profiles. While everything you do online is recorded, nothing truly holds. Presence doesn’t persist. It resets every time the session ends, the platform closes, or the terms of service change.

We’ve come to accept this. We’ve mistaken visibility for memory. If our data is still out there, we assume something of us is too. But there’s a difference between being searchable and being present. That difference is rarely acknowledged, and almost never addressed.

So why does the web forget? It forgets because it was not designed for continuity.

What stays visible is what continues to perform. If you stop interacting, the system stops caring. So, infrastructurally speaking, you…disappear.

Because in most of the systems we use, identity is kind of a condition. Conditional on your activity. Your compliance. Your compatibility with the platform’s logic.

That logic is fragile. And for most people, invisible.

So what would it take to be remembered structurally, not by trace, but by presence?
What would it mean to have identity that carries across environments, rather than being reconstructed from scratch in each one? Identity not as a product of onboarding, but as something anchored in the infrastructure itself?

Most digital identity projects today focus on verification: prove who you are, securely, repeatedly, across layers. But verification doesn’t equal continuity. It’s a checkpoint. It says nothing about what happens between those checks, or where your logic and assets live when the system stops paying attention.

Blockchain and the design of persistence

This is why Web3 and blockchain technology developers like SourceLess start not with profiles or tokens, but with position and with identity as architecture, the ground layer.

Earlier this year, the first operational SLNN Mesh node went live in Constanța, Romania -  a quiet milestone that points to a different kind of internet design. One built around presence as infrastructure.

In this model, SourceLess’ STR Domains are containers  -  structural identifiers that let people operate across environments without reintroducing themselves every time. They hold not just a name, but a role, a location in the network, and a continuity of logic that doesn’t dissolve when systems shift. A way to stay online without needing to repeat yourself to be seen.

SourceLess is building the connective tissue, a network where presence is not tied to a platform, but distributed across an ecosystem: STR Domains anchor that presence, but it’s the surrounding infrastructure  -  from the SLNN Mesh to the SourceLess Web3 browser and STR Talk — that allows it to move, interact, and grow without fragmentation. Together, they form a digital environment where identity doesn’t need to be recreated at every step, because it’s already held at the level below.

If we care about people having agency online, we need to care about more than privacy. We need systems that don’t forget them the moment they log out. That means identity has to become more than verification.

It has to become structural memory  - portable, persistent, and not tied to a company’s database.

Not everything you do online needs to be remembered. But you should be.

To learn more about SourceLess, its infrastructure, and how STR Domains enable digital presence at the network level, visit Sourceless .

Additional sources references

• Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions and Updating to Remain the Same
• Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
• Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society