The greater the technological dependencies of an electronic text on other layers of (software, hardware, networking) technology, the higher the probability that one or more layers will break and make the piece unreadable, and even unpreservable. In the past two decades of electronic poetry, this has happened more often than not. Even with sensible choices of file formats, electronic publication is radically more unstable than print. A common understanding of electronic literature as an expansion of simple text has sped up its slide into technical obsolescence. For better or worse, an in-bred academic poetics, multimedia ideology and rather uncritical choices of technology have contributed to this situation. More sustainable types and cultures of online writing do exist, but suffer from the little technological excitement they offer to new media scholars.