The Cobweb
The Web wasn’t built to preserve its past; the Wayback Machine aims to remedy that. Jill Lepore on the ethereal nature of the Web.
"The average life of a Web page is about a hundred days." Strelkov's "We just downed a plane" post about MH17 lasted only hours before deletion—but the Wayback Machine had already saved a screenshot. The only real evidence of the original claim lies in that archive.