Welcome all!

I’ve been tinkering with web archiving for almost 10 years now. This project is just the latest iteration. I’ll probably be doing this in 2036 as well.

After many starts and stops, I’ve decided that it’s finally good enough to release. So here’s MemoryHole.

What is it?

• It’s a personal internet archive.

To start, there are two ways to capture archives:

1. A Chrome extension that makes an exact copy of web pages
2. An RSS feed reader (beta, probably forever)

Ça mange quoi en hiver ?

If you’re like me and you find yourself ruminating on ideas for years, it’s helpful to go back and look at the exact webpage that you saw years ago.

Think of an important book that you read when you were younger. If you flip through the pages that your younger self doodled in, you’ll feel something. I have this feeling of déjà vu with old books when I see a dog-ear exactly where I had left it. I also become aware of exactly how much much I’ve changed as a person. Think of tweets you liked/retweeted during some kind of overblown media event, when you go back they often don’t quite make you feel the same way.

I want to replicate this experience for all the various forum threads, blog posts, and silly youtube comments that have buried themselves in the back of my brain. Eventually, it could extend to non-text media as well (podcasts, audiobooks, youtube, tiktok).

Locked gates

You’d think digital documents would be easy to copy and share. They are not. Old web pages from the ‘90s are easy to persist - save it to your disk, and then use any web browser to show it. There are no stylesheets, no javascript, no iframes - using only tables for layout, just as God intended.

Then about 20 years ago with Web 2.0, pages became interactive, javascript became required, and worst of all you have to log in to view public content. This complexity is actively being used against us to close off the web. I frequently have to solve captchas on my phone just to be able to view an article that I saw mere minutes ago on my laptop. I have a couple of digital newspaper subscriptions, and I’ll actively avoid links to them on my phone because I can’t be bothered to log in. This is stupid - I’m paying for the content, running on a device that I own, but I’m not in control of how it renders.

The frustrating part is that it’s only a problem for humans. LLM scrapers are gorging themselves on the open web. AI companies, loaded to the gills with billions of dollars in funding, have realized that there are no consequences for aggressively slurping up the internet while disregarding norms like robots.txt.

In no particular order, here are some participants in this mad race for human brain juice:

• Cloudflare demanding AI labs pay per crawl
• Reddit is apparently now profitable because they’re selling user-generated content to AI labs.
• xAI raised billions after it trained on Twitter comments

On the other hand, responsible organizations like the Internet Archive are slowly getting locked out.

We (humans) add value by thinking, leaving comments, and sharing with other humans. However, we have no rights if this content changes or becomes unavailable at some point in the future. If the current trend continues, every website is going to be a pay-per-view event (like WWE, but with none of the spectacle).

What’s the point in trying?

I’m not trying to get in the way of this AI train. You and I are already on it whether we like it or not. Our RRSPs and 401(k)s, and public pensions * is the exit liquidity for this massive bet.

I’m not trying to make you mad. Eventually, this mess will get sorted out. I just want to be sure that once all the gates are finally locked, everything you’ve wanted to keep for good is still around.

What about MemoryHole?

It’s an app with a funny name. It’s not going to pull us all out of this AI mass psychosis. I just hope that it will encourage people to reflect on the past.

The goal is to offer a service that will last for years. I’m predicting that over time the web will get more locked down, and there will be no going back to recover things.

Most of the stuff we archive will be crap. Some of it might be worth remembering. I just don’t want to be stuck in a future where ChatGPT is telling me what I should remember.

free offer

On a random note, if you've been laid off with the weak-ass excuse of "AI automation", I'm sorry that you had to pay the price for incompetent leadership. I'm sorry that your former colleagues now have to pick up the slack.

It's not much and probably not all that helpful, but please reach out to free@memoryhole.app for a free subscription. Even if you don't use it, I hope this small thing makes you feel a little better.

Unrelated notes

CPP Investment Board shenanigans

To Canadians, I'm sorry to be the one to break the news to you. Lending $400M to xAI isn't even the worst thing that the CPP Investment Board has done. 20 years ago they moved from mostly passive to active management and they suck at picking stocks. This move cost us $100B in subpar returns, but I guess that's the way she goes..

Also, it's wild that these execs still get paid bonuses for consistently underperforming their own fake benchmark. It would make more sense to pay these clever people $1B/year to sit at home and do nothing rather than sabotage something that should be a no-brainer.

Don't get too stressed out about your retirement because the 2025 Actuarial Report has modeled that CPP is sound for the next 75 years. You can trust the Office of the Chief Actuary. They're boring, independent, and they don't get paid bonuses for doing a bad job.

AI disclaimer

No AIs were harmed in the making of this content.