blog 2026 | baccyflap.com - a delicate blend of bakelite and fear

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musings on perpetual decay

If you run a webring, sooner or later you'll have to deal with decay - sites disappear, and in doing so, break the ring. They have to be removed or have a status set so that they are skipped; the latter is what I do for the no ai webring and as such the ring, beside being a community of like-minded individuals, is a catalogue of decay. Scrolling from bottom to top, more and more dead websites show up in the list. Indeed, even live websites can show signs of decay, preceding death.

The ephemeral nature of the Web is something that has concerned and inspired archivists across the decades. After all, the venerable, indispensable Internet Archive was created to preserve the fleeting parts of the Internet and it was founded in 1996, when the Web was only three years old. It is far from the only project of its kind of course - there are the Archiveteam, CommonCrawl and many other initiatives, big and small. I play a small part, in my own way.

Online decay is one of the reasons I like the no ai webring to be as legible and complete as possible; anyone can inspect the JSON file that holds all data, all sites remain linked even when they're down. As a catalogue of over two thousand sites, it plays its role in the annals of this era of the independent Web. Losing it would be a great shame, so I do my best to make sure that doesn't happen.

I am happy to discuss the no ai webring all day and to muse on digital decay until the cows come home - but that long list of websites on the ring, scrolling through it in amazement, has made me wonder about the visual nature of it. I am trained as a scientist and I cannot help but love a good visualisation - a distillation of data into something that makes intuitive sense to human brains. Something like this:

Left is new, right is old; black is up, white is down.

Like one of those time lapse videos of fruit decaying, it is fascinating to watch something diminish - though that is not entirely what is happening here, of course. The Web is never finished, so I guess in this metaphor it'd be a bowl of fruit that keeps getting replenished while the mould creeps on... not a practice I'm familiar with. So perhaps a different metaphor is in order.

Web decay may be more like a crumbling wall. When each brick is laid down it is intended to last and each bricklayer has great plans for the wall's shining future... but time can never be appeased by mortal schemes and plans change, and the wall crumbles, bit by bit. Some bricks remain but the more time passes, the more they are put to the test. On the far end of the wall, the bricklayers keep laying bricks of different shapes and sizes, lengthening the wall ever more, time hot on their heels, waiting for memories to fade and decay to set in.

But then, does such a wall exist? Is there a structure that is built, continuously over the ages, as it decays? I can't think of any. A significant part of the job of a poet is to figure out what something makes you think of - so in the throes of my ambition I've got one more arrow in my quiver.

This picture shows a perpetual stew in Bangkok with the chef tending to it on the left, and with Wikipedia and stew enthusiast Annie Rauwerda on the right. The stew was said to be 48 years old at the time.

Perpetual stews work by adding ingredients, eating the stew, and then adding more ingredients to replenish, and then repeating this process, well, into perpetuity. By the time some months have passed, the original ingredients become mix in with the new, diluting ever more. If you do not add any carrots for long enough, the carrots will dilute to nothing. If you keep adding meat, meat will dominate - but as soon as you stop, it will recede again. Everything is continuous and no one knows when the last molecule of coriander will leave the stew once it no longer gets added, though it will become ethereal long before that.

Perhaps, with some poetic licence, the Web is something like a perpetual stew. Flavours come and go, rise and fall - but the stew persists. Some ingredients, or perhaps even some providers of those ingredients, will appear and disappear, but new chefs are ready to take their place. Heck, perhaps a bunch of corporations come in, as they have in these past two decades, and dump in their toxic waste for a few years and we all lead unhealthier lives for it, but even those corporations will disappear as they lose interest and we will work twice as hard to dilute their influence, to perpetuate ourselves back into a time of deliciousness and good health.

That's more like it, I think - a stew. A stew that is built from the elements of the past but is always enjoyed in the present. A stew that is not viewed as a timeline, but as a point in time, a pot or cauldron full of the present...