March 15, 2001

by Steve Baldwin

The Web is a future-oriented medium that's "Orwellian" in the sense that it systematically self-deletes all traces of its past. Consequently, it is likely that future historians will have a terribly difficult time making sense of our era, because so very few original digital artifacts of our recent era (1995-2000) will remain in, say, the year 2020. As George Santayana so memorably noted, "those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it"; this exhibit - The Museum of E-Failure - is an attempt to save as many artifacts of our cyber-history as possible, so that history can learn from our generation's mistakes, and not repeat them. It is also an attempt to come to grips with the Web's odd aesthetic of 1995-2001 - call it "CyberKitsch".

A commercial note: an outsourced designer at mpxreview created a design for the Museum of E-Failure's Dead Dot-Bomb Mousepad. As the copy says, "you can roll your mouse over these logos in exactly the same fashion that reality employed to crush the companies they once represented".

These pads are $15 at the Ghost Sites Store - I bought one myself, and I think they look pretty sharp and provide excellent mouse traction.

Awards this month for Outstanding Webleological Achievement using the Ghost-o-Meter go to: g3m5tar, hesby, BWind, mzarnosky, lincoln, renee, kidrockfan, rnorton, pbruder, maxibia, ruchirp, ProfOwl, DFIFE, nilesh_acharya, a_nilesh, tmorgan, mchakrabarty, mgmadden, gypsy, christ, brian_patrick00, ==*lucas-teamclermont*== , cornponecaller, and other true archeologists of digital detritus!