Some people are ok with letting a major part of our lives go forgotten. The type of people who delete an email after “taking care of it”. But the world needs memory, lest we forget all the important lessons of our past. I will agree that there is value in “starting fresh” and that not all memories are worth the same, but I think that given the blunt options of either remembering or forgetting, I would always pick remembering.

Despite the tireless work of archivists and historians, despite major initiatives like The Archive, a staggering amount of the Web disappears every day. In some cases, the link to that past becomes so tenuous that even if an archived version exists, without a human remembering a now-inexistent URL, a page would be effectively lost.

Back in 2021, I was in Scottsdale and stumbled upon an art gallery downtown. I was very amused by the paintings of one specific artist represented in the gallery, the humorous surrealist painter Bob Price. I was that close to buying one of his artworks! I didn’t, but I put a mental bookmark to check on that gallery when I had more bandwidth. Fast forward to 2025. I tried looking for the website of the gallery, but the website no longer existed! It had just vanished, the physical location permanently closed according to Google Maps. Now, with the Google listing gone, looking for the name of the gallery, followed by the name of the artist, yields zero results to the dead website. And most incredible: looking for the name of the artist and the name of the gallery also results in a long list of irrelevant results on the Wayback Machine!

In a nutshell, without remembering the URL, it seems impossible to get back to those precious bits. And just to emphasize how tenuous the link to the past is: most photos from the archived gallery website were missing from the Wayback Machine. Thankfully, the original resources appeared to have been hosted on static.wixstatic.com, which was miraculously still hosting them (despite the website being offline for the past ~3 years), and by writing a simple script I was able to retrieve them all.

I don’t have an easy answer to this problem, but I will be thinking some more about it. In the meantime, I’ll leave here a dump of Bob Price work which would otherwise be lost on the web!

Bob Price’s paintings