Episode 53

Ep53: (Update) The Curious Case of the Diseappearing Internet

"If tomorrow your digital world disappeared through no fault of your own, would anyone know who you are?"

We explore the fragile nature of memory and the misconception that our digital lives are permanent. From the ancient ruins of Sri Lanka to the disappearing "master servers" of early video games, this episode examines how the "ordinary person" remains at risk of being erased from history.

  1. The Missing Ordinary: Why history prioritises the powerful and why modern data hasn’t solved the "ruins" problem.
  2. The Shrinking Internet: A look at the 25% of the original web that has already vanished and the immense technical challenge of archiving 145 petabytes of data.
  3. Digital Fragility: The loss of personal history due to dead formats, forgotten passwords, and the shift from ownership to "cloud" reliance.
  4. The Gatekeepers: How corporate whims, server costs, and shifting online sources (like Wikipedia) can effectively rewrite the past.
  5. The Chain Letter: A reflection on the host’s story and the potential for our "sophisticated" era to become as silent as the "primitive" ancestors we study.

This episode features an original short story "The Chain Letter"

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About the Podcast

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Tales under the cat tree: Conversations on Imagination, Tech & Human Adventure
Hosted by tech leader and storyteller Duleepa Wijayawardhana, this podcast explores the intersections of technology, fiction, and human adventure. Words create the worlds we live in—join us for weekly conversations that spark your imagination.

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About your host

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Duleepa Wijayawardhana

It started with late nights, glue sticks, and a university newspaper / radio.

That early obsession with how words reach people took me from student journalism to a career spanning the globe. I’ve gone from designing newspapers and having radio shows to building systems at BioWare (yes, the RPG legends), managing data at MySQL, and now leading tech at Supermetrics in Helsinki.

But at my core, I’m still that geek who believes writing is just code for the human mind.

While a computer chip executes code exactly, your imagination runs stories based on your own unique wiring. Tales under the cat tree is where we run those programs together. Whether we're exploring the fiction that inspires us or the tech that defines us, my goal is to spark your imagination and—most importantly—never make you go "meh."

Words create the worlds we live in. Let's explore them.