Miscellanea no 5: On digital ghost towns, social acceleration and our collective knowledge

Edition no 5. Date 27 March 2026
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Recently, I was cleaning my digital subscriptions: Medium, LinkedIn, RSS feeds. And many of them were forgotten and abandoned. This got me thinking about what we leave behind in our digital spaces, what connections we make and how these connections are lost when we change apps, lose access, or simply forget about them.

As I was browsing my following list on Medium, I remember how the place was buzzing with life, back in 2021-2022, around the topics of note-taking and the Obsidian notes app. That was the place where I found ideas, plugin reviews, and people writing about the app, note-taking systems, and knowledge management, in general.
As more apps emerged in the knowledge space, something changed: the reviews and articles started to shift to a more commercial tone, Obsidian’s evolution frustrated some people, and others just stopped participating. The fact that, at the same time, Medium introduced changes to its algorithm didn’t help. People got scattered, some ending up on Obsidian’s forum, others on Discord, and others started keeping a presence on Mastodon.

This phenomenon of transitions of where we post, where we are active, where network effects shift us towards is all part of the natural life cycle of the internet. And when a platform goes silent, that’s called web decay. Each platform we digitally inhabit becomes a part of our history, of our archive. And it’s happening on every platform.

At first, we had GeoCities- the first place where you could create free websites. Then, it was MySpace, which ended up being killed by Facebook. Now, Facebook is becoming a ghost town with a dysfunctional feed, AI slop, and bots. Google+, ClubHouse, Artifact, Digg (including its recent revival version, which died in under one year) can be added to the list.

A Pew Research Center analysis shows that “a quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, as of October 2023”. Furthermore, the research looked at Wikipedia and found that “54% of pages contain at least one link in their 'References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.”

But what can I do?

This is a cultural problem and a historical problem. With every link, website that disappear we lose some of our shared culture, our shared identity. The whole AI slop doesn’t help because it is flooding our digital spaces with meaningless content. Imagine being a future historian, and you need to analyse the cultural changes of the 21st century. What do you include? A total number of rotten links? AI trends in image generation? The sanitised version of the BigTech companies?

Maybe, to save and preserve, we all need to become archivists.

• You can start by hosting your website and domain. Create copies on that website and link from it to other platforms.

• Support your local libraries and archival efforts: Internet Archive, Archive Team,

• As a company or digital creator, organise old accounts, redirect what you can, and add updates on how people can connect or follow you.

• Have a communication channel that you control, like a newsletter or blog.

Currently reading

I started reading Hartmut Rosa’s Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality in its Romanian translation. ( Hartmut Rosa, Alienare si Accelerare. Către o teorie critică a modernității târzii, Editura Idea, Cluj, 2025)

Hartmut Rosa is a German sociologist and philosopher. His research focus is on the concept of social acceleration, alienation, and resonance.

He argues that technological acceleration is affecting how we perceive and organise space and time in our social life. In a human, anthropological sense, we prioritise space over time, but in our connected world,” time is increasingly conceived as an element of compression or even annihilation of space.” With this contraction of space (we are watching conflicts in a real-time feed; we can have our morning coffee in Rome, and fish and chips in London, in the afternoon), we lose its significance for orientation, because real places “tend to become "non-lieux", that is, places without history, identity or relationship.”

And the whole connectivity and constant informational flow are making us tired, confused, uprooted. We feel that we cannot enjoy simpler activities, we cannot disconnect, and our fear of missing out pushes us to a more connected presence.
It’s okay, everyone is on the same feed, with mostly the same topics. There isn’t a magic solution to this, but you can start by making small changes like starting that hobby or reading those TBR books. And by the way, read them for the fun of reading, not for some challenge from an app. Go out, photograph the booming trees, and keep those pictures only for you. Maybe print them and make a journal.

Recommendations

• An interview with Hartmut Rosa about his research topics. Hosted by UNESCO, 18 minutes in English. Link

• Another interview with Hartmut Rosa made by Bjørn Schiermer for Acta Sociologica, “E-Special: Four Generations of Critical Theory in Acta Sociologica”, 2020 Link

• OpenAI is closing its Sora AI app. And Disney will cancel the promised 1 billion $ investment in OpenAI. Image generation will still be possible in other OpenAI models. Link

• The Casetta Tessino is a wooden cabin created by the Architect Olin Petzold. Because of building restrictions, the resulting idea was to use the forest as a foundation and integrate the project into its environment. A project that works great as a studio, office, or thinking retreat. Link