There are holes in the internet, flaring and spreading like the white ghosts consuming an old black-and-white photograph. In columns I wrote just a few years ago, links I carefully added to my argument now lead to nothing; worse, I can barely remember what these pages ever contained, because I’ve delegated masses of my recall to Google. There are things I’ve written that no longer exist, the sites that published them now defunct, and the original documents trapped on some ancient hard drive in a file format that might as well be a dead language.
There’s a perverse release in this destruction. The promise-slash-threat of the internet, after all, is that whatever goes on there is on there forever – and as Jared O’Mara could tell you, the things that persist from your online history are not always kind to you. O’Mara, the MP for Sheffield Hallam, was suspended and later resigned from the Labour Party after the Guido Fawkes website revealed he was responsible for a litany of sexist, homophobic and xenophobic forum comments. For many, O’Mara’s protests that he was no longer the laddish young man who made those posts were not enough.
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