I lost a blog I wrote in college. Not because I deleted it — the service just shut down one day. Years of writing, gone. No warning, no backup, just... gone.
That's when I started thinking about permanence. Not just "how do I back things up," but "how do I store something in a way that it might still exist in a hundred years? A thousand?"
It sounds dramatic, but I don't think it is. We preserve physical artifacts all the time. Books, paintings, records. We understand that some things are worth keeping for the long run.
Why shouldn't digital things get the same treatment?
That's why I'm building Inscribe at v03.
The problem with digital permanence
The average lifespan of a website is something like two or three years. I didn't believe it at first, but then I started noticing dead links everywhere. Articles I'd bookmarked, projects I'd followed, communities I'd been part of — all gone.
Even things that feel permanent aren't. Cloud services shut down. Companies go out of business. Hard drives fail. File formats become obsolete.
Most of what we create digitally won't survive more than a decade or two. Not because it's deleted, but because the infrastructure supporting it just stops existing.
What Inscribe does
Inscribe is about building DNA storage on top of decentralized networks. The idea is that you can store data in a way that's meant to last not just years, but potentially centuries.
Using protocols like Arweave, your data gets distributed across a decentralized network with cryptographic proofs. It's not sitting on one server that might go down. It's redundant, verifiable, permanent.
At v03, I'm using this to preserve things that matter. Not everything — storage isn't free or infinite. But manifestos, creative work, important records, community archives. Things that might still mean something decades from now.
Why this matters
I think about future historians trying to understand what the early internet was like. What will they find? Probably a lot of broken links and missing data.
If we want future generations to understand this moment, we need to be intentional about what we preserve. We need systems that can outlast any single company or platform.
At v03, I'm trying to build that. Tools where preserving something important doesn't require running your own servers for decades. Where it's just part of the workflow.
Because we're creating more than any generation in history. It would be a shame if none of it actually lasted.