Alan Jacobs links to some writing on the Internet as collective hallucination, which is a way of saying that not only is the internet not forever, links die rapidly and sites vanish ... something WtH knows perfectly well from documenting the late Mars Hill!

https://blog.ayjay.org/the-rotting-internet/

If there's something Wenatchee The Hatchet has discovered first-hand chronicling the life and times of the former Mars Hill Church it is how astonishingly variable, mercurial and pervasive link-rot is. When people presume to say, "People have no excuse not knowing what Mark Driscoll is like because they can look things up on the internet" the answer to that is, "Really?  Can you? "  Show me.  From 2013 even through to the final months of Mars Hill Church massive information purges and robots.txt ensured that piles of stuff I documented could abruptly vanish from the internet the week after I quoted something Mark Driscoll said and then robots.txt ensured that not even The Wayback Machine could be used to go look up versions of it.  If you read the rest of this post you'll even get to see there's a tag dedicated to robots.txt situations.  But let's proceed to the article Alan Jacobs links to, okay?

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/06/the-internet-is-a-collective-hallucination/619320/

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Now, I just quoted from Google’s corporate website, and I used a hyperlink so you can see my source. Sourcing is the glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together. It’s what allows you to learn more about what’s only briefly mentioned in an article like this one, and for others to double-check the facts as I represent them to be. The link I used points to https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/crawling-indexing/. Suppose Google were to change what’s on that page, or reorganize its website anytime between when I’m writing this article and when you’re reading it, eliminating it entirely. Changing what’s there would be an example of content drift; eliminating it entirely is known as link rot.

 

It turns out that link rot and content drift are endemic to the web, which is both unsurprising and shockingly risky for a library that has “billions of books and no central filing system.” Imagine if libraries didn’t exist and there was only a “sharing economy” for physical books: People could register what books they happened to have at home, and then others who wanted them could visit and peruse them. It’s no surprise that such a system could fall out of date, with books no longer where they were advertised to be—especially if someone reported a book being in someone else’s home in 2015, and then an interested reader saw that 2015 report in 2021 and tried to visit the original home mentioned as holding it. That’s what we have right now on the web. 

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People tend to overlook the decay of the modern web, when in fact these numbers are extraordinary—they represent a comprehensive breakdown in the chain of custody for facts. Libraries exist, and they still have books in them, but they aren’t stewarding a huge percentage of the information that people are linking to, including within formal, legal documents. No one is. The flexibility of the web—the very feature that makes it work, that had it eclipse CompuServe and other centrally organized networks—diffuses responsibility for this core societal function.

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A comprehensive breakdown in the chain of custody for facts on the internet may be an important reason people like Mark Driscoll can hand-wave away "the internet" as the work of "bloggers" who are demon-infested nay-sayers who don't recognize all the work he's doing for God in public while behind the scenes the history of Mars Hill in 2013-2014 was trying to clamp down on a flood of behind-the-scenes leaks to me or Warren Throckmorton or Warren Cole Smith highlighting rapid turnover in longtime staff.  By August 2014 Mars Hill leaders had to concede a lot of material that had been posted to The City (don't ask, at least not here) ended up leaked online.  I provided a list at the time which I shall reproduce here:

1. Apparently Mark Driscoll says of Mars Hill "We're not a wealthy church"

2. Driscoll's announcement that Bill Clem was leaving Mars Hill

3. Transitions at Mars Hill Downtown and Bellevue, aka the departure of Tim Gaydos

4. Alex Early's departure from holding Bill Clem's job

5. Mars Hill in a time of numeric decline

6. Executive Pastor Tim Beltz' letter declaring that former MH founder Lief Moi was not a good financial steward while neglecting to mention Beltz' own role in the process that gutted Moi's salary the previous year.

7. Establishing that Scott Thomas had remained a member of Mars Hill despite having accepted a staff position at Darrin Patrick's church.

8. Presentation of Matt Repucci as elder candidate

9. Sutton Turner thanks Mars Hill for giving

10. Investigating whether Jamie Munson was still a pastor at Mars Hill Church despite his absence from the public elder roster

11. Jon Krombein resigns eldership and membership, announced by Scott Harris

Those were all leaks from The City just for the years 2013 and just to Wenatchee The Hatchet.  So, in case anyone is inclined to believe any Driscollian claim that Mars Hill Church got "hacked" that is probably not what hapepned.  What happened was sources believed they could not express concerns up the chain of command given Driscoll's track record of quelling dissent and so the release valve for frustration went outward to here and elsewhere.  That the Dear Driscoll website exists at all suggests that Mark Driscoll has, despite any claims he may have made to the contrary, apparently learned nothing actually useful from the demise of Mars Hill Church in relationship to openness of information.  

The above noted article in The Atlantic, in turn, linked to this one.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/raiders-of-the-lost-web/409210/

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If a sprawling Pulitzer Prize-nominated feature in one of the nation’s oldest newspapers can disappear from the web, anything can. “There are now no passive means of preserving digital information,” said Abby Rumsey, a writer and digital historian. In other words if you want to save something online, you have to decide to save it. Ephemerality is built into the very architecture of the web, which was intended to be a messaging system, not a library.

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Yep, which is why Wenatchee The Hatchet saved gigabytes worth of stuff about the history of Mars Hill and backed it up offline and set up a redundant back up of discs distributed to almost a dozen people so that if anything ever did/does happen to Wenatchee The Hatchet as a blog here, the super-majority of information obtained and retained can, in principle, be put right back on the net if need be, or become the basis of another form of documentation.

Mark Driscoll may well rely on the assumption people have when they visit his newest sites that they will never actually cross reference his sermons there to marshill.se to find out that one sermon that was 27 minutes long at Driscoll's new site was about 70 minutes long when it was first preached at Mars Hill in 2006 during the "Christians Gone Wild" series.  To see that ... 

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/03/over-at-mark-driscolls-site-new-and.html

Now how and why would a sermon that was 70 minutes go down to 27?  What was cut?  Well, we chronicled that, too.  Driscoll, who has long said "I just preach the Bible" has demonstrated with a particular sermon that, once his crew purged out all the material from the 2006 sermon where he was excitedly telling us who were at Mars Hill in 2006 about all the sweet real estate deals going on and the leaders who came along with those deals, the formerly 70-minute sermon became a mere 27 minutes.

Link rot is just the inadvertent stuff.  That doesn't cover the active purging and changing of materials.  If you want to learn more about the history of Mars Hill, with all the warnings in advance that this blog was chronicling a lot of raw data and information and statements in what was functionally real time, and linkrot and vanished webpages frustrate you, you can come  here.  I can't promise you easy reading either in terms of the mass of material, the nature of the material, or the format.  This has never been a watchdog blog or an online discernment ministry as those labels get used.  

But to the extent that I have tackled what people call watchdog blogging, I pray I have done a good job preserving the kinds of things that Mark Driscoll and his designated aids were persistently purging from the internet in the 2013-2014 era.  It seems as though what Mark Driscoll may think he learned was how to clamp down on information so that nobody outside the higher numbered circle-of-trust people get sensitive information.

The problem seems to be that Driscoll's hair-trigger and capacity to do 180 degree turns on people who would have been ranked 8 or 9 and turning them into zeroes instantly hasn't changed.  That means that whatever people may read at https://www.deardriscoll.com/ may now be cross-referenced with the majority of material available via links and tags here at Wenatchee The Hatchet at a dedicated page.

Linkrot is real, even without active attempts to purge and hide or change documents.  At least where the history of Mars Hill Church is concerned, however, there are a variety of resources you can consult, this blog merely being one of them.  So when people ask "How on earth could people not know what Mark Driscoll is really like?" A stew of linkrot and active suppression and alteration of online materials goes a long way to keep people who didn't already know where to look from ever finding the stuff they would have needed to know to discover that the Mark Driscoll of The Trinity Church seems to have more or less the same vices he had at Mars Hill but with a stronger penchant, to go by recent accounts about him, for conspiratorial theorizing.  Meanwhile, good luck to anyone trying to find the video of Driscoll's initial statement about the Mars Hill Orange County eviction notice.  Linkrot is not just a thing that happens with Mars Hill.  Kyle Firstenberg's blog, linked to in the Orange County eviction blog post here at WtH, is no longer active.  Sometimes in the history of things Mars Hill a blog on the Mars Hill side goes down but almost as often a blog about Mars Hill goes down and linkrot happens that way, too. It's not as simple as some binary conspiracy theory as people on various sides of any internet debate about, say, Mark Driscoll or Mars Hill Church might be tempted to think it is.  

Perhaps moving forward those of us who chronicled Mars Hill can be of assistance to those chronicling newer events at The Trinity Church.