When reading Jill Repore’s “The Cobweb”, I remembered following the Ukraine conflict and the MH17 story live. I also remembered seeing Strelkov’s post on VKontakte, as it had started spreading virally before it was taken down. Since I saw it with my own eyes I am certain it is actually legitimate. However, this got me to think about how the story would have turned out if the post hadn’t spread. What if only a few people had accidentally noticed it, and later, in a few days, someone found the post archived in the Wayback Machine? Would people believe it was true? Because the post was reported on the Russian news before it was taken down, even Russian people found it difficult to doubt its validity. In the hypothetical scenario, would Russians have believed it? Would other non-Western countries?

Currently, the history of the Internet is decentralized. It’s collected by national libraries, non-profit organizations that might or might not be politically related to their countries’ governments, and for-profit organizations that, even if they aren’t politically influenced, can be bought. Moreover, none of these organizations hold the authoritative historical record - as Niels Bruegger writes in his essay, each of them either have different pieces of a website, or separate imperfect copies of it. Bruegger considers this an opportunity for future historians to investigate multiple sources and come up with a conclusion. This is a valid approach in history, where uncovering actual, ontological truth is not as important as getting the right conclusions. However, in the legal system the former is absolutely crucial, and a mechanism to uncover the truth currently doesn’t exist.

In the past few years, the tech world has been embracing decentralization. So far, the only successful means to enable that have been purely technical. Bitcoin enables decentralized money, OpenBazaar enables decentralized businesses, Etherium enables decentralized governance and other interesting applications. They all achieve this by using mathematics and cryptography. Maybe it’s time to look at web archiving the same way, by developing a decentralized system that provides formal, mathematically provable guarantees of truth and accuracy.