the internet is a fickle beast
on losing the work of YEARS of writing published online
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Hi friends,
Today I feel sick to my stomach.
Is there a worse feeling as a creative in our world of modernity and mundanity than having your work lost, deleted, or erased? From the page, the Word doc, the hard drive, or, as in this case… the internet?
Before I made the pivot into writing in the tech world, my first job out of college was as an associate editor at a digital media company. For three and a half years, I worked there, writing one or more articles per day for the company’s eponymous women’s lifestyle website.
I wrote hundreds of articles for this company, all of which still existed on the internet up to this day—well, up until recently. I never technically owned my content; they do. Did. And I know what you’re thinking: “Kimia, why didn’t you download your work, save it in PDF form? Something?”
Many publications keep their websites up, even if they are no longer actively publishing articles. Case in point, Gawker.
Apparently, though, it was purchased by another, larger media company last year, after which mass layoffs happened (surprise, surprise), and this website and its sister sites changed hands. When I reached out to my old manager about it, she told me that they’d taken the sites down recently and there is no way to retrieve anyone’s work.
“Bummer, I know,” she wrote me on LinkedIn.
But also, I should have saved my work.
These are excuses I’m swallowing along with the bitter taste of bile. I still have many of these articles linked within my digital portfolios. They made up the bulk of my online writing career before I made my foray into tech. I was proud of the writing I did, even if I didn’t love my role toward the end of my time there.
My heart is breaking. But what’s worse is I feel completely idiotic; I should have seen this coming. Many of us who have been working in digital spaces for years now have seen waves of publications come and go.
This is why we must be so careful with the breadth of our work as writers. At the time I hated signing away ownership over the articles I was so painstakingly creating, but I felt it had to be done. A company will always prioritize its own bottom line, not that of the employee, especially not an entry-level writer. And issues of copyright and ownership are only worsening at alarming speeds with the advent of AI, but that’s the topic of another newsletter entirely.
This is why I’m writing on a platform like Substack now, where I own my words, in perpetuity, and can move them off the platform if I so wish, whenever I desire.
I’m never giving that up again.
All the same, I am currently licking my wounds. Some harsh retrograde lessons, that is for damn sure.1 I’m not necessarily ready to somehow spin this into a positive just yet, or hit you with some inspiring words. This is a loss that must be grieved, and it’s come on like a sudden lancing pain to the chest, revealing a wound that’s bright and fresh-gleaming with blood.
Have you ever experienced something similar, or lost work—especially creative work—that was extremely important to you? How did you cope? I am definitively Not Okay right now.
xx, Kimia
**EDIT: Thanks to my dear friend Elaine, I was able to salvage a small percentage of my writings through a search engine site that pulls content from archived websites. It’s nowhere near close to all of my work, but I’m thankful to have been able to save what I could, and there’s a pretty high likelihood I’ll be republishing some gems on here, so stay tuned. Big love and deep belly breaths.
There are currently seven planets in retrograde, juuust in case you were curious.
This resonates deeply. Thank you for sharing. It’s painful and loss cannot be replaced. I felt the experience like a shattering - and then noticed, after time, there was a way to see it as if it were a crystal bowl that had broken. The light caught the odd tiny spark and glimmer. And that let new things happen. It was essential to let the light in. Ans start again. Lessons about saving work learned (double save everything - to a cloud account and back up to a usb/hard drive). But also about letting go. There’s a beauty in impermanence. But for now, sending good vibes to hold you in all those shattering feelings.
Oh nooo! I am so sorry. That’s such a gut punch. A few months ago I was finally beginning to compile and edit photos from the last five years of opening a business, eight cross country road trips, and a six month stint in Japan...and my external hard drive crashed. I had no idea what was lost, what got saved in some paranoid duplicating I had done as a half assed back up...and I still don’t really know. I walked away, too afraid to look. I’m pretty sure some images are in ten different places and others are gone forever and I don’t even know where to begin.