Lost in time

The Year Is 2050

You are not “checking your old projects” the way you used to check old photos. It is more like opening a drawer of odd objects you once built by hand: a tiny wooden box, a key you no longer own the lock for, a perfectly shaped stone you picked up because it felt important at the time.

Your projects are like that now. Some still open with a satisfying click. Some fight you. Some are just labels pointing at places that do not exist anymore. You start with the easy ones.

A directory called potomushto.com is mostly text files. Markdown. A few HTML pages you once generated and never touched again. You open one and it just appears. Instantly. No “restore environment,” no “dependency mismatch,” no “this plugin can’t be verified.”

It feels the way it feels to find an old printed photo: slightly too sharp, slightly too honest, and strangely immune to time. The rendering is different than it was in 2026. Fonts drift, spacing changes a little, but the words are the words. Links still point somewhere or they do not. Either way the text stays. And that is the trick: plain content does not need an ecosystem to survive. It needs a surface.

Then you open the harder drawer.

A little macOS app you were proud of. Sleek, minimal, “native.” It used to feel permanent because it lived inside the operating system, not on some website. But the OS has evolved the way cities evolve. It did not “break” your old apartment, it just stopped building roads to that neighborhood. Code signing rules changed. Sandboxing got stricter. A security model shifted after some global incident you barely remember now. The app still exists as a binary like a fossil exists as a shape. Recognizable, but not quite alive.

You can revive it. Of course you can! Everything can be revived now with AI. But reviving is never free. It costs attention, and attention in 2050 is expensive in the way your free evenings used to be expensive.

And then the games.

Some run in a compatibility bubble and feel right in a weird way, like hearing an old song on new speakers. Others load but the magic is not there: the physics are off, the controller mapping is wrong, the timing feels like someone retold a joke with different pauses.

You remember, suddenly, that games are not just software. They are performance. Timing. Latency. Input. A particular kind of friction. And time changes friction.

Now the hosting question returns, because in 2050 the internet is not a place you “put things.” It is a meter.

You scroll through a neat list of services that were once cheap because each one felt like nothing: a small site here, a webhook there, a little worker, a domain redirect, an analytics script, some uptime monitor, a storage bucket with “just a couple files.” Each one was fine. Together they are a constellation with a monthly price tag that looks more like a utility bill than a hobby.

You realize something slightly uncomfortable: the cost was not the cloud. The cost was counting. Every project that stays alive demands a little ongoing payment, like a tiny aquarium in someone else’s house.

So you consider the other route: the home machine.

Not romantic, just practical. A quiet box that you replace every so often, and the maintenance cost spreads out across years like buying a good tool instead of renting one forever. It is not free, but it is predictable. It feels like owning a shelf in your own basement rather than renting drawers in a hundred different buildings.

One machine in the corner of your future home, humming gently. Some projects hosted there, most archived there, all of them yours in a literal sense.

And then you hit the real graveyard: the integration projects. The ones that talked to other services like WeirdStats. Most of them are gone, not because your code rotted, but because the other side disappeared. APIs closed. Companies pivoted. Services merged, rebranded, died, got regulated, got acquired, got sunset. The internet changed its furniture.

Those projects feel like old screenshots of conversations with people you no longer know. Not sad exactly, just un-runnable.

2075

You are older now, older enough that you stop trusting anything that depends on a company staying interested.

By 2075 it is harder to imagine that a hosted blog still sits quietly on some free tier, unchanged, faithfully served from the same place. Even if the page still exists, it is a miracle you do not want to budget for.

But the repository feels different. It may survive, not nesseceraly as a git, but as some source control. Filesystems still exist in 2075, one way or another.

A hosted site can disappear like a storefront. A repository is more like a box of papers. It gets copied. It gets mirrored. It gets bundled into backups and exports and “takeout” archives. It ends up inside someone else’s cold storage the way family photo albums end up in attics. Even if the original platform is gone, a bundle often survives somewhere because it was small, easy to copy, and once copied, hard to fully erase.

Maybe the GitHub Pages version is gone by then. Maybe your domain points to nothing. But the git history, zipped into some archive you forgot you made, still has all the posts. Markdown is still there. HTML is still there. The shape of your thinking is still there.

And then a stranger question appears, because by 2075 software preservation does not feel like a heroic act. It feels optional. By then, much earlier even, AI have eaten so much of the internet that “the past” is accessible in a new way. Not as exact files, but as a kind of memory. Slightly compressed. Slightly vague. Full of smooth edges where details used to be sharp. But ready to be regenerated almost instantly into something you can touch.

You ask yourself: if a model can reconstruct the feeling of your old app from something by accessing your memory directly, does it matter whether the binary still runs?

If a model can recompile your game into whatever the current modern emulator is, does it matter that the original engine died? If a model can take your old blogposts and lay them out in any style you want, does it matter which generator you used? It is tempting to say no. It is tempting to accept the new kind of preservation, the kind that keeps the gist but not the grain. But then you look again at the printed photos.

A printed photo does not try to help. It does not summarize your childhood. It does not improve the framing. It does not infer what you meant. It just sits there with all its awkwardness intact. It preserves the exact light that happened to fall on the scene that day.

That is the difference.

A model gives you a version that is usable. A file gives you a version that is true. Maybe nobody needs it except you. Maybe this museum is private.

Maybe in 2075 it is not about future generations at all. It is about having a few artifacts that do not negotiate with you. A few things that remain stubbornly themselves, even when everything else in the world prefers to be regenerated.

This lets you meet your earlier self.