Listening to the recovered logs is like listening to a dying star. You hear the final beep of the tape drive, then the dreaded click of death, then… silence. The review gets 5 stars for pure, gut-wrenching narrative.

The restoration effort was a mess. In 1997, Brewster Kahle (founder of the Internet Archive) famously said, “We got lazy. We assumed the data would just stay there.” The “Bad” is that we didn’t learn. We lost MySpace photos in 2019. We lost CD-ROM games. We lose data every day. The Crash of ’96 was a warning we are still ignoring.

No, not the whole Internet. But specifically, the loss of GeoCities’ “Heartland” district, half of the early Usenet archives from 1993-1995, and—tragically—the entire first two years of a certain book review archive based in San Francisco.