In Death of the Masterpiece, Istaara Amjad ’28 explores our ever-changing relationship to art in the modern world. 

Birthday cards from primary school, event tickets, filled-up notebooks — I like to collect things. It could be called a sentimental inclination or simply a waste of space. Either way, it is a habit that I have kept up my entire life, stubbornly refusing to throw away the copy of a favorite book that I reread until it begins to fall apart alongside a beloved childhood toy.

Emily Dickinson’s poetry was only published after her death. Van Gogh rose to fame posthumously. These stories inspire and comfort us. With the assurance of an enduring legacy, the brief flicker of mortality does not seem so futile. It seems that every great human undertaking — from the shining spires of the Taj Mahal to the flags planted on the Moon — is, at heart, a plea against being forgotten. In 1977, NASA launched the Golden Record into space, a time capsule carrying sounds, images and music from Earth. Even as we confront the final frontier of cosmic exploration, this desire fuels us.

Will someone know we existed? Will they remember? 

And isn’t this the question we ask of each other every single day? When we capture memories with a photograph, when we write in journals, when we tell children stories, when we make something and put it out into the world or even — bear with me here — post on Twitter? 

My desire to collect, to curate an archive of my remembrances and stubbornly refuse to forget, may be a strange habit. But I am certainly not alone in this. There is no trait more human than the desire to be remembered.

As our lives shift increasingly online, the memories of our lived experiences do, too. Finally, we can escape the fallibility of human memory; we can hold on to every detail. Every text exchange, every email thread, every picture in the phone gallery — nothing is lost.

My curation (read: hoarding) extends to my digital world, utilizing the refined archival methods of folders-within-folders, endless bookmarks and never deleting anything ever. No need to confront the unwanted clutter in my desk drawer or the dilemma of packing memorabilia into a suitcase for college: digital storage is the hoarder’s paradise.

However, the digital medium can also be remarkably fragile and unpredictable. Hard drives become corrupted, and phones die without warning. Social media accounts get hacked, and passwords get forgotten. Cloud storage has been championed as the solution, though I admit the concept of my own memories being locked behind a paywall feels strange. Still, the premise is undeniably attractive. I can conveniently outsource my remembrances, as well as the burden of their preservation. Could this be immortality?

The internet is forever, right?

Occasionally, I revisit links I saved years ago: recipes, Youtube videos, interesting blog posts. More often than not, it is a dead end: the video might have been taken down by the creator, or the host website may not exist anymore. This is not incidental. Internet content is remarkably short-lived. 25% of web pages collected by a study between 2013 and 2023 had vanished by the end of those 10 years. 11% of the references linked on Wikipedia lead to a dead end. 

The internet prompts a false sense of security. A digital platform and the content it hosts can simply disappear. The organization running it can go bankrupt, stop paying for domain hosting fees, fail to repair a server error or simply choose to remove the content. If this happens, the content — whether it is a news article, artwork or a personal blog — simply vanishes without a trace. 

The enterprise of historical cataloguing, supported by vast networks of libraries, museums and archives, does not seem to have translated well to the digital medium. Internet Archive has taken on the challenge: founded in 1996, it is a digital library that has preserved millions of works of media and billions of web pages through a service called the Wayback Machine. However, the burden of historical preservation is monumental and prone to complication. The non-profit has recently faced a major copyright lawsuit as well as cyberattacks. 

The fact is, digital content and its ownership — and therefore, its conservation — are fundamentally different from their physical counterparts. Paying to view content through a streaming service subscription is nothing like owning a DVD, which may have been vulnerable to wear and tear, but once bought, was yours forever. 

When streaming services remove a movie or TV show from their platforms, it can become virtually impossible to access anywhere on the internet. Amazon has removed the ability to download purchased ebooks, which means they can remove your access to a book even after you have “bought” it. 

With Adobe accused of using artwork created on their platforms to train AI and Facebook censoring private chats, the extent digital corporations exert control over the platforms they provide is proven time and time again. 

It is a harsh reminder that in the digital world, nothing is truly yours. Yet, a vast extent of human knowledge, art and culture now exists solely online. When the digital spaces we inhabit exist on someone else’s terms, and corporations driven by profit and political forces caring little for preservation and posterity decide what’s worth keeping and what isn’t, we must reckon with the sure and gradual loss of human history. 

What does it mean to be forgotten? How absurd is the unimaginable, until the moment — all of a sudden — it isn’t?