[HN Gopher] The Digital Dark Ages
___________________________________________________________________
The Digital Dark Ages
Author : zdw
Score : 42 points
Date : 2022-07-04 16:11 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (deprogrammaticaipsum.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (deprogrammaticaipsum.com)
| BirAdam wrote:
| Using networked things as an example of why this a "dark age" is
| inaccurate. As long as the server and client software survive,
| the curious will make instances of both. This has already
| happened with large networked installations of other computing
| systems requiring clients and at least one server.
| rcoder wrote:
| Which "server", exactly, will allow me to recover the messages
| from a conversation on Facebook after the service as we know it
| is long gone? (Out of business, moved entirely to the
| "metaverse", transcended along with the rest of the AI
| resistance, whatever.) Ditto my Twitter photo uploads, comment
| threads in GDocs, or app wireframes in Figma, much less code
| running on a cloud server somewhere.
|
| Once upon a time, by recording a thing you made it durable *by
| default* and even got a copy you could do with what you liked.
| Now, recording and sharing words or ideas comes with zero
| assumption of durability. Your service provider's ToS and
| business fortunes might support them keeping it around and
| accessible for now, but there is zero guarantee that will
| outlast the whims and fortunes of a SaaS providers.
|
| The combination of DRM (to lock down devices) and "everything
| lives in the cloud" (to keep custodianship and control of data
| in vendors' hands, not creators') means that without very
| intentional, often obscure and/or annoying manual steps, your
| correspondence, recordings, and other creative output will not
| survive you. Even _with_ painstaking effort there's every
| chance it won't work.
|
| Personally, I've tried for a couple of years now to get people
| I work with to write important things down somewhere that isn't
| Slack, GDocs or another pay-to-play service. Business,
| personal, silly, whatever: as it stands, all of that culture
| and history and creativity is just going to go "poof!" as soon
| as some company's C-suite does the math and decides the storage
| and compute to make it available don't pencil out any more.
|
| Now I just accept that unless I have 1) a complete, easily-
| cloned copy of something, 2) that I can access and manipulate
| using OSS software, 3) on a general-purpose computer I
| physically control, then that thing is not *mine*. If it isn't
| mine, I can't decide what happens to it in the near term, much
| less once I'm not around to lobby for access.
| BirAdam wrote:
| A lot is always lost. Nothing has changed. In this case, some
| amount of data will survive (especially because data is
| valuable as a commercial asset), the software itself will
| likely survive, and instances will later be setup in a
| virtualized environments. The preservation of data for
| practicality is very different from historical preservation.
| Most data from any era gets lost because people at the time
| do not consider historical value. They consider what is
| needed for their own goals. Beyond that, most books
| deteriorate, film deteriorates, etc this is no different from
| any of that.
|
| I understand and sympathize with the idea of open standards,
| open formats, and the desire for more accessible media and
| storage. I really do. The loss of ownership over everything
| is a bummer. However, pretending that we are more at risk of
| data loss now than before is not valid. DRM always gets
| cracked. Pirates always find a way. Encryption is likely
| already compromised by intelligence agencies who slurp
| everything up in their own archives. Data hoarders are a
| thing. Mass duplication of data is a thing. People have made
| recordings and films showing interactions with all of our
| current systems. People have made all kinds of documentation,
| documentaries, tutorials, and other media regarding our
| modern culture, modern technologies, and so on. This is the
| single most well documented period in history. If anything,
| we're doing better at this now than ever before.
|
| The real issue for future historians will be sifting through
| the amount of material.
| tekchip wrote:
| I actually had the idea to help prevent this quite some time ago
| but unfortunately lack the skills to bring it to fruition. Maybe
| someone else can if I put it out there. Likely not, but here
| goes.
|
| It's rare to impossible for a single institution to maintain all
| such personal record. The internet archive does a valiant job,
| but barely scrapes the surface. The only way for this to work is
| if individuals maintain their own historical record. So the
| question is how?
|
| I figure most people aren't savvy so a company who provides a
| storage device, and perhaps services to help gather said data,
| would be essential. I'm thinking it works like life insurance
| where someone pays over time and their data is then delivered to
| them, at the conclusion of any payments, or to their family in
| the event of a death. Perhaps this could simply be rolled into
| life insurance or something of the like?
|
| That's the basic gist. Put the power to save this information in
| the hands of the people to maintain going forward. Like having
| someone's written notebook kept long into the future. Except it's
| a storage drive. Tech hurdles there for sure, but with things
| like MS's Project Silica, and the like, perhaps not
| insurmountable.
| asciiresort wrote:
| > Nostalgia is the least inclusive interaction with a museum of
| historical artefacts because you cannot teach anyone nostalgia:
| they either were there and remember the thing on display, or they
| do not.
|
| That's not true. A not uncommon type of museum in Japan are the
| "Showa Era Museums".
|
| I was not alive during this era, but I feel nostalgia
| nonetheless. For context, these museums usually capture the
| 50s-70s, Japan's rapid economic growth feeding into consumerism,
| or maybe the other way around, and there are record players,
| pachinko machines, and a very distinctive, bright, neon filled
| aesthetic.
| Havoc wrote:
| I'd say this should be seen in the context of quantity of
| information produced too though.
|
| Even if 90% is encrypted and lost it seems likely to me that the
| remaining 10% is so much in sheer volume that future historians
| will have little trouble piecing it all together. At least
| compared to say roman times where you're lucky to get anything at
| all
| slondr wrote:
| On the flipside it seems like we could really easily end up in
| a situation like the whole thing about dinosaurs having
| feathers.
|
| If the 10% of surviving information isn't a representative
| sample of the other 90%, the conclusions future historians will
| draw will be very wrong.
| jcranmer wrote:
| The idea that the digital world is launching us into another
| "Dark Age" is probably overselling the issue. Let's look at how
| much actually survives from the pre-Dark Ages.
|
| The complete corpus of Classical Latin and Greek literature can
| be found in the Loeb Classical Library. Which easily fits on a
| couple of bookshelves in your study (note that the books consist
| of the original text and a translation on the facing page). With
| a couple more volumes, of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, we
| can also add to our collection every single identified piece of
| inscription, including even an entire volume on mileposts.
| Similarly thorough works will doubtless exist for all classical
| languages, even non-European ones like Mayan or Chinese.
|
| Now walk into a library, even the tiny library of a small town.
| You are surrounded by more written text than survives from likely
| not only Classical Antiquity but all of human history through
| 1500. Even in the digital age, we are still producing more
| written text than most of human history. Probably, we are
| preserving a larger _fraction_ of texts than were preserved from
| the Classical era. It 's telling that the complaints of the loss
| of preservation are of the kinds of ephemera which don't _exist_
| for most periods of history. (Also telling that the person
| complaining about this loss of preservation is a "senior
| Research Software Engineer" and not a historian or archivist or
| similar field that actually deals with preserving or working with
| preserved data.)
| dwheeler wrote:
| > The complete corpus of Classical Latin and Greek literature
| can be found in the Loeb Classical Library.
|
| Well, no. The complete _surviving_ corpus, sure, but almost all
| of those works have been lost, never mind those of earlier
| eras.
|
| A short summary:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work
|
| For a specific example: I was trying to understand some of the
| history of logic. I learned that that in ancient Greek times
| Stoic logic was widely used. What was it? That is hard to
| answer, because practically everything is lost now. We've had
| to reconstruct the Stoic logic axioms from fragmentary sources,
| that's how bad it is. We know there was more, but we don't know
| exactly what it was.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-05 23:01 UTC)