you are reading this on a device that will be obsolete in four years.

the average webpage lasts 100 days before the URL breaks. the average book lasts 200 years. the difference is not the content. it is the medium.

digital text does not age. it vanishes. there is no graceful decay. one day the server responds. the next day it does not.

this is not a metaphor. this is HTTP 404.

the internet archive has saved 835 billion pages. that sounds like permanence until you learn that 38% of pages from 2013 are already gone. not archived. gone.

you bookmark a page. you return in six months. the domain expired. the company pivoted. the developer deleted the repo. the CDN changed its URL scheme.

none of these are failures. they are the default.

a clay tablet from 3100 BCE is readable today. a webpage from 2019 may not be. we traded durability for speed and called it progress.

every framework you adopt is a bet that its maintainers will outlast your content. react 18 replaced react 17. react 17 replaced react 16. your content did not change. only the vehicle decayed.

plain HTML from 1993 still renders in every browser. a gatsby site from 2020 requires node 14 which requires an OS that no longer ships it.

dependency is not a feature. it is a countdown.

the text you are reading is eroding. you may have already noticed. the characters are being replaced as you scroll. this is not a bug.

erosion is the honest state of digital things. we build on substrates we do not control. the server is rented. the domain is leased. the protocol is maintained by volunteers.

what survives is what requires the least infrastructure to exist. plain text in a file. HTML served over HTTP. no build step. no runtime. no vendor lock-in.

the web was designed as a document system. documents are permanent by default. applications are temporary by default. we turned documents into applications and wondered why nothing lasted.

this page will also erode. the domain will expire. the server will be decommissioned. the text will exist only in the internet archive, if it is crawled in time.

the only permanent copy is the one you remember after closing this tab.