Posted by awnird 14 hours ago
This was the whole point of it all and why the people in power have bet the farm on it.
A lot of the "cultural record" the author refers to is just digital junk. Random digital content that very few people care about, if we're being honest. Trying to hoard every bit of digital information ever produced is not the same thing as preserving "culture".
Case in point:
> Even the increasing use of ephemeral formats like Instagram Stories and WhatsApp status updates means that large portions of cultural, social, and political communication are never conserved in the first place. As a society, we can probably survive bad search results and come up with another way to schedule a sunset make-out session. But we can’t aspire to sovereignty if we can’t retain and retrieve our collective memory.
For most of human history, nobody was trying to "conserve" every cultural, social or political communication ever produced, and I fail to see how Instagram Stories and WhatsApp status updates, many of which aren't even truly broadcast publicly for all to see, are part of some imaginary "collective memory."
If you find a web page, see an Instagram Story or receive a message that's important to you, save it or take a screenshot. But let's not pretend all these things belong in a global Digital Civilizational Archives.
There probably are some important hidden discord groups that would explain the origin of many political positions. Unlike smokey meetings in scummy bars, that exists now and is on a database somewhere.
And that's public announcements. Do we really need to archive more than a few of the "I'm in this city, look at me I'm so rich and beautiful" short videos?
It does, but do you think that people at that time thought anywhere near as much about preserving their scribbles as we do?
I'd venture a guess that we've created more "content" since the advent of the internet than in all of human history prior, and most of it is stored on things that aren't even designed to last a human lifetime without failure.
The idea that we're going to save every piece of digital junk for posterity just isn't realistic or healthy.
> What's just disposable background noise to us may provide context into how we lived and thought to our far-future descendants.
You're right, but you're also assuming that they're going to care that much, and that we're going to survive that long.
Well as far as digital letters, photos, menus, etc. are concerned, there's nothing stopping someone with the means and motivation from investing in a doomsday storage facility specifically designed to store these things for posterity. If people can do this for crypto they can do it for digital content.
As for physical items, do you know how much junk Americans have in storage units? The US self-storage industry generates over $40 billion in annual revenue. We're probably keeping more "stuff" in storage units where it has a chance of surviving a zombie apocalypse than at any point in human history.
I don't necessarily think all this digital stuff is worth saving, i just see how it could be that we are essentially erasing our modern historical record by putting 100℅ of it in private data centers with no permanent records.
And then you see how plenty of contemporary digital media from the last 30-40 years is actually already lost to time just in our short timeframe. I don't think acknowledging that this could be detrimental is necessarily an argument for trying to preserve all of it. We, as a society, went very rapidly from preserving a lot of it to preserving none of it. I don't see the harm in thinking about the implications of that.
Nobody actively preserved letters and menus and postcards and photos, they just persisted by nature of being physical. Digital records only persist with continuous effort to preserve them. So the record for future historians will be highly curated and likely much more limited.
My hope is that with the torrent protocol we can make the archived knowledge discoverable and seedable, because currently there's only the web archive and the kiwix download servers for archived contents. Both of them still are centralized servers that bear the cost of hosting those files.
If you want it so bad stop crying and make it, that's what I've been doing. It works a lot better than whatever this post and many of these comments are. There are dozens of us !
It is a bit risky, and I think the broader internet can make it worse. There's always the risk of a massive falling-out between players and developers which can sink the game. Latest example is probably the Love and Deepspace fiasco, but we've seen quite a few failed launches recently.
Maybe a job for an AI to do? :D