Last January I spent two weeks tracing every external link I had ever posted on my blog. What I found was an extinction event. Of the hundred and thirty-seven links scattered across a decade of writing, eighty-nine returned 404 errors. Twelve redirected to domain squatters. The rest pointed to pages so thoroughly restructured that the original context had evaporated entirely.
The Architecture of Forgetting
We built the early web on a simple contract: link to something and it persists. URLs were permanent addresses, not temporary suggestions. Between walled gardens and quarterly redesign cycles, we abandoned that contract without a vote.