Making the Internet an Immortal, Evolving Organism

The ancient Greeks imagined a “universal library” — a permanent repository of all human knowledge. The Library of Alexandria, built by the Ptolemaic dynasty, was the first attempt at this, aggressively collecting manuscripts from across the known world and standing out as a monumental accomplishment in preserving humanity’s creativity.

The Library is said to have contained 30% to 70% of all manuscripts ever written — a staggering achievement. Yet, despite its aspirations, it was not timeless. Fires, purges, and neglect eroded its collections, leading to the loss of hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, a deprivation of culture whose full extent remains unknown.

Nearly 2,000 years later, the internet promised to be a digital Alexandria, a universal library preserved in the cloud. Yet today’s internet, dominated by a few tech giants, has drifted from this vision. Websites shutter, firewalls block knowledge, and social media platforms censor information. Like Alexandria, instead of providing humanity with a permanent memory, the internet is suffering amnesia.

Blockchains, with their immutable ledgers, offer a solution to this impermanence. But their data capacities are extremely limited, and as history shows us — from the events that destroyed Alexandria’s collection to Nazi book burnings — a universal library must have vast, permanent storage to resist censorship and time.

This is what Arweave’s founders envisioned for their protocol — a permanent memory for the internet, capable of evolving over time as technology advances.

“Being able to see the past with clear vision is a fundamental part of the sense-making infrastructure of society,” said Arweave founder Sam Williams.

The Internet’s Impermanence: Why We Need Arweave

The internet today is anything but static. It’s an impermanent space where data is constantly deleted, moved, unindexed, manipulated or lost.

It’s true that nothing lasts forever — but the internet’s increasing tendency toward the ephemeral undermines free speech and accountability. Websites rise and fall, taking information with them, and people are often powerless to stop the losses, which can be incalculable to culture and history.

History is full of examples where censorship threatened human understanding, from Charles Darwin’s delayed publication of On the Origin of Species to Galileo’s censorship battles with the Church. The internet, with its global reach, is not immune to censorship either. China's "Great Firewall" and internet blackouts from repressive regimes show that this threat is still very real.

The good thing is that information, data, and the sum total of human learning have other ideas. To adapt Ian Malcolm’s quote in Jurassic Park: info finds a way.

As Sam Williams observed, "There is no real situation in which attempting to hide information ever works. The more important or powerful the information is, the more it will spread."

As it turns out, info just needs a little help to become permanent, permissionless, and censorship-resistant.

That’s where Arweave comes in. The founders created the protocol to ensure that the internet’s impermanence no longer poses a threat or technological obstacle to free speech or historical memory. The protocol achieves this permanence by requiring just one upfront payment, which is then stored in a decentralized endowment and released to node operators who store the data in ever decreasing amounts over time, forever.

Just as vital as the protocol’s mechanisms for permanence, the founders recognized the need for governance mechanisms that enable information’s adaptation and evolution.

Enter: Fair Forks.

Fair Forks: A Solution to Digital Impermanence

If Arweave is the key to permanent memory for internet data, then Fair Forks is the adaptive technology that ensures the network evolves as the internet and data storage technologies change.

“We want permissionless innovation, we want people to be able to build on top and make the network better, and we want them to be rewarded for doing so,” said Sam Williams. “This mechanism does not cap their reward: it actually creates a market, hopefully an efficient market with enough participants so that the different strands or genuses of the network, in some sense, compete effectively over time. And that is fundamental to how the network will be able to adapt around problems that are at this point virtually unseeable.”

Fair Forks enables “permissionless innovation” while preserving the integrity of the original network. It guarantees rights for information permanence through structured social governance and market mechanisms that incentivize community buy-in. The idea is simple: anyone can create a new version of Arweave addressing any perceived imperfection or vulnerability and propose a reward to themselves for doing so, as long as they meet three basic requirements.

As such, Fair Forks also creates an immune system that protects against forks that deviate from the agreed-upon rules. This adaptability ensures that Arweave and its forks will keep the network relevant and resilient well into the future, without losing the protocol’s original mission along the way.

“A network of any kind is an organism in some sense — it has this set of incentives to glue it together in the same way that a biological organism is normally composed of cells that perform individual functions, but together they make some kind of logic like a machine, for lack of a better word,” says Sam. “Except that [Fair Forks] has this evolutionary mechanism built in where the thing can adapt while it's alive.”

Use Cases for the Internet’s Permanent Memory

An immortal evolving internet with perfect, permanent memory offers significant benefits for both the internet and human civilization. From free speech and scientific research to digital art and social media, the “permaweb,” as Arweave’s founders affectionately call it, presents a number of new possibilities.

Data provenance becomes easier and more reliable with permanent storage. With immutable records, we can always verify the origin of data, whether it be for art, journalistic articles, or financial transactions, and whether the data was originated by humans or produced by AI. Historical documents, scientific research, and personal records are also made easier to archive, more secure, and cheaper to maintain.

For media organizations and citizens in repressive regimes, Arweave offers an irrevocable right to trustless free speech, as it already does for users in countries like China and Russia. A permanent, censorship-resistant protocol ensures that vital information remains accessible, even in the face of new and creative attempts to suppress it.

New types of decentralized social media platforms could also thrive, offering an alternative to centralized platforms that are prone to censorship or manipulation. With permanent storage, users would no longer need to rely on platforms owned by large corporations, often in countries like the US or China.

“These platforms are not geopolitically neutral,” Sam Williams says. “So, having a neutral place to store people's statements about what is, is itself extremely valuable. If Twitter had been a protocol from the beginning, things would have been radically, radically different.”

AO and ArFleet’s Role in Supporting Arweave's Mission

To realize a permanent internet, the Arweave ecosystem offers some key components.

Arweave itself is the data layer, while the new protocol AO provides a computation layer, enabling public, verifiable compute at scale. If Arweave is the permanent internet’s hard drive, then AO is the CPU and GPU, powering the interactions with data stored on the network.

“AO is something we’ve seen as evidently really exciting to people and it pushes adoption of Arweave at a faster pace,” said Sam Williams. “AO is already 50 to 70% of all the data uploaded to Arweave. As the size of the AO economy grows, the size of the data set on Arweave grows, which is great for everyone.”

ArFleet, another key component, provides temporary, time-bound storage for some users’ less permanent storage needs, like session information or temporary user data.

Together with Arweave, these components support a decentralized, permanent, and evolving internet, capable of powering almost any kind of app. They enable use cases like a permanent AI-powered "Librarian of Alexandria," able to answer any question with accurate, immutable information — available from any device, anywhere in the world forever, assured by Fair Forks’ ability to enable and incentivize users to address any challenges that might arise along the way.

Let’s Build an Adaptable and Timeless Internet

Like the Library of Alexandria sought to store and protect all human knowledge, Arweave — enabled by Fair Forks — ensures the permanence of data in a digital space under constant threat by coercive and corrosive forces. But unlike Alexandria, which succumbed to the forces of time, this digital library has the potential to not only survive but also adapt and grow.

To learn more about Arweave and Fair Forks, and to understand how you can contribute to this evolving ecosystem, explore the resources found here, and let us know if you’d like to join us in building an internet that will last for centuries.