Tech moves fast, but losing Gizmodo Australia has been slow and painful

When news first broke in July that Pedestrian wouldn’t be renewing the license for Gizmodo, Kotaku, or Lifehacker, my instinct was to head straight to Giz and salvage some of my most memorable work before the site disappeared forever.

It wasn’t easy. Much of my writing had been reassigned to the generic “Gizmodo Australia” byline, likely when Pedestrian took over, and digging through the archives felt like trying to download a 4K movie on a dialup connection.

But the bigger issue was me: I worked at Gizmodo between 2008 and 2011, with sporadic contributions until 2012. That was over a decade ago. I can barely remember what I wrote last week.

In the end, I managed to save just two pieces. The first was my hands-on with the original Red Dead Redemption, framed around the lyrics to Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive.” The second was a feature on the motion capture tech behind L.A. Noire by Aussie developers Team Bondi.

Since Gizmodo Australia was erased from the internet last month, I’ve been stewing over the fact that, from three and a half years of bloody hard work—thousands of articles—I could only think of two to save.

Gizmodo Wasn't Just My Job

The lack of urgency to save more of my writing isn’t because those years weren’t memorable. I still vividly recall moments that defined my time there: flying to Auckland to cover the sale of the first iPhone 3G in the world, a bizarre trip to IFA via Tokyo with competition winners, and the infamous “GizMod” car giveaway, where we transformed the hideous Toyota Rukus into a (still hideous) techie dream car.

But I didn’t feel the need to archive most of it. It wasn’t just the nature of my work at Gizmodo: Covering news quickly and moving onto the next thing; it was something deeper.

Back then, Gizmodo wasn’t just my job—it was me. My identity was inseparable from the site. I lived and breathed Gizmodo, pouring myself into every story, every launch, every quirky gadget feature.

So how could I so strongly associate myself with a media brand and yet, over a decade later, feel so indifferent about preserving the work itself?

Gizmodo at the Crossroads of My Life

Seventeen years ago, on my 28th birthday, I met Chris Janz, the founder of Allure Media, for coffee to discuss becoming Gizmodo Australia’s Editor. It was the easiest job interview I’ve ever had. Chris offered me the role within an hour, and despite my delayed start, I was invited to the Christmas party.

Just three months later, I was on leave to get married. The Allure team gifted me a set of wine glasses, which I still have today—though we rarely use them because they’re much nicer than our usual ones.

Those early days flew by. Testing underwater cameras on my honeymoon in Fiji. Traveling to Hong Kong for reasons I can’t quite remember. Covering the Star Wars exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum. Switching from Movable Type to WordPress, after which I stopped losing drafts (though I never followed Angus Kidman’s advice to not write in the CMS).

But the personal and professional moments that stand out most are tied to my family. Just 21 months into editing Gizmodo Australia, I became a parent. My son was born, and everything changed.

Around the same time, Allure Media had grown enough to require editors to work in-office full-time. Suddenly, I was commuting 3–4 hours a day while trying to balance work and a newborn at home. It was hard on me—and even harder on my wife, who had to juggle parenting, cooking, and cleaning while I was away.

Looking back, that stress marked the beginning of the end of my time at GizAU.

A Legacy Deleted

Even after I left, Gizmodo never really left me. I freelanced and guest-edited occasionally, including one block in late 2011 that coincided with the (emergency) birth of my daughter.

My wife was 30 weeks along when her waters broke, and I spent weeks balancing freelance gigs, hospital visits, and caring for our son. I still remember writing a guide on packing a hospital bag before 32 weeks for Lifehacker, filing it from the waiting room at Westmead Hospital.

On December 5, three days after my daughter was born prematurely, I started a two-week stint editing Gizmodo from the NICU. Work was a welcome distraction from the stress, though I couldn’t tell you a single story I wrote during that time.

One moment from that period has stuck with me, though. In the waiting room, I met another dad, a Gizmodo reader, whose baby had broken its arm during birth. We talked about gadgets, the nurses, and the stories I was working on. I think I wrote about him in one of those articles.

Like everything else I wrote for Gizmodo, it’s gone now.

Tech Moves Fast, but I Want to Slow Down

A couple of years ago, I found my old copies of T3 Magazine, where I was editor before Gizmodo. Flipping through them, I laughed at the ridiculous things I wrote as a 20-something who thought he knew everything.

I can’t enjoy that same retrospection with Gizmodo because it’s been erased from the internet.

I’m not vain enough to think anyone else would want to trawl through my thousands of posts. But those years mattered—to me and to Australian tech journalism. Giz covered critical moments: the fight against Conroy’s internet filter, the NBN shaping a federal election, and the stories that made people fall in love with technology.

The arguments we made then are still relevant today.

But I can’t revisit them, can’t build on them, because Gizmodo Australia has been erased from the internet.

So much of my personal history—my marriage, the birth of my children, and everything in between—is tied to a legacy I worked so hard to build but can no longer revisit.

It’s devastating.