[HN Gopher] Shining a light on the digital dark age
___________________________________________________________________
Shining a light on the digital dark age
Author : weird_science
Score : 119 points
Date : 2023-09-01 18:18 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (longnow.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (longnow.org)
| rrherr wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230901181858/https://longnow.o...
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| [dead]
| izzydata wrote:
| I think there is something to be said about what is worth
| archiving. I don't know what it is that should be said though. It
| seems weird to me that as a society we might be saving things
| such as a 10 hour video of white noise for another 100 years
| rather than some personal blogs. What is and isn't worth saving?
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| IMO social media got a little better once temporary stories
| came out.
|
| Slack's limited search history is a feature too - forces you to
| document using appropriate tools and not endless email
| threads...
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| > Slack's limited search history
|
| I'm sure that I don't know what you mean. My employer is on a
| paid plan for Slack, and searches cover everything, as far
| back as I wish to go. Are you thinking of the limitations on
| the free license?
| esafak wrote:
| In my experience it makes people ask the same questions over
| and over.
| rolobio wrote:
| It will probably end up being the most popular things, the most
| viewed or read. More copies of it, more likely to be archived.
|
| This reminds me of books. I'm sure the majority of books from
| over a hundred years ago are lost because they weren't popular.
| We haven't really noticed their absence...
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > I'm sure the majority of books from over a hundred years
| ago are lost
|
| If they were in one of the university libraries that Google
| scanned, they're not "lost." But you're right; you can't read
| them. Congress should mandate that the Library of Congress,
| at least, get a copy to preserve them for the ages.
|
| Read the Atlantic article
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t.
| ..
|
| for the sad story.
| _jal wrote:
| What's interesting there is how many authors of works we
| consider classics now only become popular well after their
| deaths.
|
| Kierkegaard, Thoreau, Dickenson and Melville, for instance.
|
| If their works had been lost, "we" probably wouldn't have
| noticed any of those absences either.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| When you publish a book or magazine in France you're required
| to give 2 copies to the national library for archive purpose.
| Doesn't something like that exist in other countries?
| debugnik wrote:
| It certainly does in Spain. We even extended it to
| videogames, although I don't know how much that achieves
| when so many games are barely playable before the first few
| patches, have much of their content released in future
| updates and many are unplayable after the servers close.
| grotorea wrote:
| Does that applies to all books, even if you have 10 copies
| printed and distribute them privately?
| Pxtl wrote:
| > It will probably end up being the most popular things, the
| most viewed or read. More copies of it, more likely to be
| archived.
|
| So, 10 hours of white noise yes, some person's personal blog
| where they poured their heart out, no.
|
| Beautiful.
| cj wrote:
| > I'm sure the majority of books from over a hundred years
| ago are lost
|
| Especially if you include independently published books that
| weren't widely circulated. I wonder what percentage of total
| books this is.
|
| My grandfather published a book before he passed away. It was
| never sold online or in any big retail stores. Once the last
| hard copy is lost, it's gone forever.
| colinsane wrote:
| > Once the last hard copy is lost, it's gone forever.
|
| i believe the Library of Congress will archive that book
| for you if you mail them a hard copy. assuming it has a
| ISBN, you're in the US, etc.
| cj wrote:
| That's a very good idea. Thanks for the tip.
| imtringued wrote:
| Absence? Technically we haven't even noticed their presence!
| rolobio wrote:
| Absolutely. I wonder what percent of tweets or blog posts
| are even seen by one human?
| kamel3d wrote:
| It would be very interesting for us to learn about something in
| ancient Egypt that is equivalent to white noise today. I think
| the issue of storage should be solved and made abundant. We
| should not be worrying about what to save, but rather what if
| we cannot save.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Depends on how many whales are left in 100 years.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| I think there is something to be said about what is worth
| archiving. I don't know what it is that should be said though.
| It seems weird to me that as a monastery we might be saving
| things such as a 10 volume satyrical piece about a forgotten
| greek tyrant for another 100 years rather than some personal
| thoughts of an Egyptian philosopher. What is and isn't worth
| saving?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| AI is going to give a lot of that data that would have
| otherwise died eternal life. As the tech evolves, businesses
| will be able to monetize by selling data (for walled gardens)
| or their pages will all be scraped, cleaned up and resold by
| multiple orgs (for stuff on the open web).
| kbrannigan wrote:
| Most paper, pen and pencil will outlive most digital media. Most
| printed photos will outlive digital photos. Most CD, DVD, VHS
| will outlive cloud stored videos.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| And yet I suspect that digital information involving
| identification and tracking for the purpose of serving ads won't
| be lost, because there's money to be made and control to be
| exerted.
|
| Oh please. You'd have to be naive to think otherwise.
| jawns wrote:
| One area where I expect this digital rot to have significant
| effects is with obituaries. It will likely frustrate the next few
| generations of genealogists hunting for records of early 21st
| century ancestors.
|
| Obituaries that appeared in print newspapers during the 20th
| century were easily disseminated and decentrally archived
| (typically by loved ones and libraries), making them relatively
| rot-tolerant.
|
| Distribution isn't a problem for digital obituaries, and in many
| ways the web is better than print in this respect.
|
| But when it comes to preservation, there are many factors that
| make digital obits in their current state particularly
| susceptible to rot. They tend to be centrally archived and often
| behind paywalls, making them susceptible to digital rot and
| difficult for organizations acting in the public interest to
| archive.
|
| The for-profit company Legacy.com controls a strikingly large
| share of the market for digital obituaries. It partners with
| funeral homes and newspapers, and in many cases when a visitor
| browses obituaries on the website of a local newspaper or funeral
| home, they're actually redirected to Legacy.com, which hosts the
| content.
|
| Unfortunately, the newspapers and funeral homes themselves often
| don't maintain their own copies of the obituaries. What happens
| if Legacy.com or one of the smaller memorial sites goes out of
| business or experiences some sort of data loss? Because of the
| centralized nature of how these digital obituaries are stored,
| it's possible that very few other organizations will have
| archived copies of the content.
| numtel wrote:
| For these kinds of things that don't take a ton of data, a
| blockchain is a great place to store them for a long time for
| one upfront fee.
| causality0 wrote:
| What's preserved is also getting more and more sterile. Material
| that's now unfashionably rude or just plain unprofitable has a
| tendency to just be erased. I invite you to look through your
| Liked YouTube videos and witness how much of what you enjoyed has
| been taken from you forever.
|
| Consider that everything you witness has an expiration date and
| if you don't save it maybe nobody else will.
| grglburgp wrote:
| Attenuation of signal is how reality works.
|
| Generational churn means eventually no one who knows why the
| nested dolls were nested as they are will be gone. Humans will
| create a new set of nested dolls they can grok.
|
| Paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson; clearly the dead do not rule the
| living.
|
| Edit; forgot this point... Maybe he said that; it's unverifiable
| for us. Maintenance of hallucination is all it ends up.
|
| Reality we see, smell, hear, and touch is what we get. There's no
| violating physics. Let it be lost. It's going to happen anyway.
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| > Paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson; clearly the dead do not rule
| the living.
|
| Yeah but don't listen to him, he's dead.
|
| Hence we can safely conclude that the dead _do_ rule the
| living.
|
| Checkmate, Epimenides!
| chrisco255 wrote:
| The only reason you can paraphrase Thomas Jefferson is because
| his words were archived a long time ago, and the archives have
| survived all this time.
| grglburgp wrote:
| Sorry; I did not make my point clear. Were they his words or
| is the association made up?
|
| Without direct observation it's hearsay.
|
| What's the point of maintaining associations we can't verify?
| The truth that Jefferson stated such is only hallucination
| for us.
|
| The value is in the awareness of the realities mechanisms,
| not the association with Jefferson.
| kepano wrote:
| I like the idea of accepting transience, but if we lose
| important knowledge we return to superstition.
| xwdv wrote:
| We should think of digital information more as graffiti. It won't
| be around forever, I've seen most of the old web that I
| experienced as a child simply disappear, nothing but a memory
| now. Enjoy information while you have it, eventually it will be
| lost, like tears in the rain.
| duck wrote:
| Why is there a leading zero on all the years listed like 01980s?
| hollerith wrote:
| To encourage the reader to take the long view. That's the idea
| anyways.
| maverick2007 wrote:
| I've been noticing this a lot lately in one of my little hobbies
| of Halloween events. There's so much history from events in the
| early 2000s that has been lost. So many links in ancient web
| forums that 404 and aren't in the Internet archive. Info from the
| 2010s is much better but still missing a lot of media. As an
| individual, I certainly don't have the resources of some of the
| organizations listed in this article but I've been trying to do
| what I can and mirror important sites. I dread seeing what the
| future looks like as more and more of the communities in my niche
| move onto discord and away from more traditional web forums.
|
| ETA: The issue I face is two-fold. More pressingly, there are
| files just missing. Nothing I can do about that barring someone
| magically having them downloaded to an old PC. But also
| interesting is working with old formats. The 2000s/early 2010s
| Halloween Horror Nights websites were all written in Flash. They
| have tons of little Easter eggs and information for the event
| obsessives like me. Between fan backups and the Internet archive,
| the files are pretty complete thankfully. But since Flash has
| been dead for a while, I have to rely on the Ruffles Flash
| emulator to get it running on the web. But that doesn't work
| super well. On my list of things to do is to contribute to the
| project to try to get some of the files working.
|
| In case anyone is curious about my backup of the event or if
| you're also a fan and have any of the files listed to share and
| archive, my site is hhncrypt.com!
| usea wrote:
| Just yesterday I went searching for a memorial page for someone
| who died in 2005. It's still been maintained ever since then,
| and I was grateful to read through it again.
|
| Even a single-file website with 2 photos can be important to
| somebody. Thanks.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| On the other hand, most public text files from 80's and 90's
| are still here.
| theragra wrote:
| My story is simple: I supported important historical site, but
| due to war and personal issues I was not able to transfer money
| to .ru zone registrar. I have the data, but domain was lost.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| If it has historic value, you can upload the data for free to
| archive.org to avoid data loss.
|
| .
| alentred wrote:
| This reminds me about the "Life After People" television series
| [1]. In several episodes it presents possible or imagined
| scenarios in case of a sudden human removal, in various areas:
| cities, animal life, oceans, etc. Every single bit of modern life
| requires maintenance. They could have added an episode about the
| digital information :)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_After_People
| figassis wrote:
| Would it be a good idea to create something like the arctic vault
| for other info? What are the logistics of that?
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| The way things are and have been progressing for awhile now, this
| line sticks out in my head often:
|
| _If it happened before the internet, or during an early stage of
| it, or there isn 't an archive of it somewhere online, did it
| really happen??_
| kepano wrote:
| I love to see more interest in the topic of digital continuity.
|
| My philosophy around this is "File over app" -- if you want to
| create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can
| control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools
| that give you this freedom.
|
| In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important
| than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but
| your files have a chance to last.
|
| https://stephanango.com/file-over-app
| reidjs wrote:
| I agree with "files over apps." I used google docs for my
| personal notes until one day I had shoddy internet and realized
| how awful it is to lose access to something important that you
| wrote down.
|
| I now use iA Writer which allows you to save your notes in
| markdown from iPhone, syncs via iCloud, and then I can continue
| from my laptop. Admittedly the native Notes app has some better
| functionality around sharing and searching. However, Notes
| saves into a SQLite db, which would be fine, but it's not
| trivial to view the tables/schema in there.
| cobertos wrote:
| Just ran into this. Many companies I request my data from have
| retention periods and would rather be rid of it. Rare are a
| couple that do seem to keep _everything_ though
| mesozoic wrote:
| Couple hundred years and cataclysmic disasters and only L. Ron
| Hubbard writings will be left.
| imtringued wrote:
| Oh I know. There is an easy solution to this. Just sell the
| information for Bitcoin and use Bitcoin as a store of value and
| then in the future buy the information back using the store of
| value feature of Bitcoin.
|
| (Cough, someone still has to store the information.)
| pro-kythera wrote:
| Proof of Archive
| MrMattWright wrote:
| The sites serving me up a 500 internal server error - which you
| know - I guess fits the title :)
| rollcat wrote:
| Tangentially relevant: http://collapseos.org
| dappermanneke wrote:
| i don't think people realise just how much of data degradation in
| the age of everything being documented online is a good thing.
| nobody wants to see your cringe from 20 years ago. the internet
| is a conduit for culture and much of it has to be erased and
| rebuilt with every generation, such is its nature
| cardboard9926 wrote:
| Interesting how much data is being collected/stored nowadays, yet
| how fragile storage to store that data is.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| Imgur recently purged an untold number of pictures from their
| servers. How much knowledge has simply been discarded because it
| was too expensive to keep it?
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Won't no one remember imageshack.us and, dare I say,
| rapidshare?
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| I live in a small country with a weird language and with a lot of
| our local pop music...
|
| The new music is fine, everything is on youtube.... for now! ...
| but the older songs are disappearing.
|
| Years ago, we had a bunch of "mp3 sites" (websites where you
| could download pirated mp3s), that disappeared, a huge local
| torrent tracker, focusing also on local stuff, that lost most of
| the data in the OVH datacenter fire and slowly died, and some
| stuff was put on youtube 15 years ago, and then got copyright
| claimed 5 years ago, and was removed. The music groups don't
| exist anymore, so the CDs aren't publushed anymore, second hand
| shops are very rare and cater mostly to LPs and tourists, and the
| groups stopped existing before they could sign deals with the
| publisher for streaming services.
|
| So yeah, it's not just "those semi-personal photos taken on a
| party and kept by maybe one or two people", but also pop-music
| that used to be on the radio all the time in late 80s, early 90s,
| and is just..gone!
|
| I'm sure that there are data hoarders somewhere, that have mp3s
| of all those songs somewhere, but unless we get some p2p type of
| service like gnutella/ed2k/kazaa working again, I won't be able
| to find them anymore.
| espe wrote:
| not sure it helps but - soulseek is pretty alive
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| I recently logged into Soulseek for the first time in about a
| decade, and I was unable to find lots of stuff that was
| commonly shared in the early millennium. It's no secret that
| the generation most interested in audio filesharing is
| graying, and as many people raise families and have less and
| less time for obsessive music collecting, they fall away from
| the scene.
| version_five wrote:
| When I was in university late 90s early 00s, my friends and i
| had all kinds of music and tv clips downloaded from p2p
| sharing, that I have since lost and can't find. Clips from
| shows, remixes of songs. Like you say, somebody must have them,
| but they're not findable anymore.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| _" I'm sure that there are data hoarders somewhere, that have
| mp3s of all those songs somewhere, but unless we get some p2p
| type of service like gnutella/ed2k/kazaa working again, I won't
| be able to find them anymore."_
|
| Such archives would need to be kept online though. If only
| archived (or hoarded), it's just data in a box that no-one can
| access.
|
| Current internet is really poor at handling this long tail. Eg.
| a movie can be streamed & torrented, millions see it, many have
| it in personal archives, but 1 year later the torrent swarm has
| died out, and those personal archives of the downloaders aren't
| online. And then copyright holder pulls it from their streaming
| service.
|
| Result: nowhere to be found. Even though popular not long ago.
|
| Copies in personal archives don't count for much if others
| can't access that data.
| [deleted]
| noarchy wrote:
| Looks like the article in question is getting the hug of death.
| But information is being lost in droves even today. Entire
| YouTube channels can vanish overnight, for various reasons,
| taking years of content with them. Without any backups floating
| around out there this stuff is gone forever, and this is assuming
| we even know about any backups.
| nomel wrote:
| > Without any backups floating around out there this stuff is
| gone forever
|
| I think part of the problem is that most backup efforts result
| in lawsuits. Related, I wonder how much the data stores, like
| those that OpenAI used, have _preserved_ , and I wonder how
| much they will purge from their servers, to be lost forever, as
| the lawsuits increase.
|
| For Youtube, it also has compression rot. It's _not_ a storage
| solution, as I 've learned. All the videos I uploaded have
| slowly reduced in resolution, bitrate, and quality, over the
| years. Those that are more than a decade old have become a
| blurry mess that I can barely see, at a fraction of the
| resolution. I can't blame them. They don't really have views,
| so they're a money sink.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I think the Library of Congress should be given a well funded
| mandate to create and maintain a digital archive of the entire
| publicly accessible internet.
|
| The government is probably already doing with the NSA but we
| normal people can't access it.
| seydor wrote:
| Good. Every time we forget the old world, we reinvent it better
| gadflyinyoureye wrote:
| That is so true. Use to be that slaves knew they were slaves.
| We're much better at hiding that.
| izzydata wrote:
| "Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it" - George
| Santayana
| seydor wrote:
| Those who remember it keep repeating it alright
| chriswait wrote:
| If this wasn't true, we couldn't know it.
| discussDev wrote:
| Or we think we do, giving ourselves a much needed boost to ego
| and letting the cycle continue and keep everyone happy. Always
| assuming that we have made things "simple" because we know our
| way and not someone else's etc. That being said there's a lot
| of progress in the end but we take a lot of steps backwards to
| get there.
| wwweston wrote:
| Having forgotten the old world, how would we know?
| nemo wrote:
| >Every time we forget the old world, we reinvent it better
|
| Historically that has not been the case for most of human
| history. As odd as it might seem, in general the rediscovery of
| the accomplishments ancient world has been a great driver
| towards progress. The periods when the accomplishments of the
| past were lost and fully forgotten were the sorts of times
| people call Dark Ages.
| eep_social wrote:
| Are we currently in a Digital Dark Age because the pace of
| content creation has far outstripped our ability to preserve
| that content for posterity?
|
| Obviously we can't be sure how the current era will be viewed
| from the far future, but your comment made me realize that
| the current situation has similarities to that dark age.
| justrealist wrote:
| Actually the cities that are the most modern and progress-
| oriented today are the ones that felt comfortable bulldozing
| all relics of the past.
|
| (or the ones where the "old city" was destroyed in brutal
| urban warfare)
| nemo wrote:
| Responding to a statement about "for most of human history"
| with a reference to a very recent event isn't something you
| should begin with "actually" since it's not a reply to what
| I was saying, it's just your own tangent. Also, actually,
| even in the early modern period people were still looking
| to the past for inspiration even when they were reusing
| land - there's far more to the past than mere buildings.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| You mean the cities that are most expensive and worst to
| live in, because they didn't have relics of the past
| putting brakes on the greed of real estate owners and
| developers?
| justrealist wrote:
| This is word salad.
| jrh3 wrote:
| Each generation thinks they are so much smarter than the
| previous.
| nomel wrote:
| It's not reinvented, it's iterated, knowingly or not. And, you
| can only move towards optimization by knowing your derivative.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| We have made a lot of progress in this field.
|
| Part of storing data is the cost per byte per year. That cost is
| ridiculously low on my home 52 TB workstation. (2 TB NVME, 14 TB
| and 2x 18 TB HDDs)
|
| A backup copy is stored on 3x 18 TB HDDs in USB enclosures.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I think it is important to focus on portability and archivability
| of our online spaces.
|
| Using today's technology, it is possible to allow exporting all
| content as basic file formats such as txt + zip.
|
| In addition, PKI (public/private key infrastructure) allows us to
| decouple a user's private and public identities, meaning the
| public identity can now be portable between servers.
|
| What does all this mean for the average user or community
| operator?
|
| It means your community can be completely transparent, auditable,
| and PORTABLE, allowing any user to archive the whole thing and
| clone it to another server -- right away or years later.
|
| I've been writing a framework for this type of system for several
| years now, and if you're curious, you know where to look.
|
| Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| With AI we have a real chance of 'losing the past' as in we won't
| be able to tell fact from fiction. The bar to modify images,
| video, and text form the past will be so low that everyone will
| do it. And on top of that, coming autonomous agents will do be
| creating and modifying information at rates we just won't be able
| to keep up with.
|
| I'd say we should sign everything we can now, anything created
| from 2023 onward is already suspect of being created by AI. The
| past will be 'erased' as well if there's no way to verify our
| historical information.
|
| For example, I create an AI photo of Frank Sinatra in an LA diner
| eating a sandwich and post it online - tell me how on can verify
| today that picture is legit or not. Whose the arbiter of all
| Frank Sinatra photos? How much time, effort, and money would it
| take to do that verification? Now extrapolate this example to
| everything. The past becomes only myth and legend.
| [deleted]
| nighthawk454 wrote:
| is that really any different than the rest of history? maybe
| blindly trusting recordings is a bubble.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| AI is going to give us the power to extrapolate information
| from the past like never before. With a few lines of text I
| may be able to create a feature film on Abraham Lincoln, how
| much of that will be 'frog DNA' spliced in to keep the story
| going? Which may be used as source data for something else,
| and so on. The past is already a game of telephone into the
| future. With the ability to fill in the blanks provided by
| AI, the signal to noise goes way down. Figuring out the
| actual real source information becomes a lot more valuable,
| but without locking down that source information today we may
| lose the ability to verify many pieces of information as
| sources versus AI creations in the future.
| figassis wrote:
| There is a difference. Humanity lies, but until now it could
| not retroactively mass fabricate truth so convincing that
| even people current day skeptics had trouble seeing through.
| When I say current day, I mean in the past, a genocide was
| being seen as such by at least part of the human population,
| but than that truth was erased by storytelling. Today, events
| are fabricated into existence by AI. You go to google to find
| alternative resources and you can't trust them either. You
| can't verify because it is too costly to verify every single
| thing you see/hear/read. It's a problem.
|
| I can imagine a couple million years from now, some alien
| species shows up, we're all gone and they think maybe we had
| wings, some of us were born with blue hair and other were
| half robots. I get they can study some of our remains, but so
| much of us is mutable digital info now.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| So is prosperity and civilization.
| tough wrote:
| Is good to remind that history is always written by the
| winner side by necessity.
|
| Also they usually like to burn any -history- or -culture- of
| the loosing side and adapt their customs to their new ones
| and call it a day, erasing history pretty much, as much of it
| as they can at least.
|
| YMMV
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| This is different, because:
|
| - You usually can attribute history written by a victor to
| said victor;
|
| - There's only so much control a victor has over what's
| being kept by the monks, librarians, museum curators and
| individuals, and what of it will resurface once they're
| gone.
|
| With AI, we're not talking about alternative history, but
| rather about infinite, arbitrary alternative histories that
| can't be told apart from the real one.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Its kind of a fun thought, but the past will become more like
| the future, we can guess what probably happened, we'll never
| really know for sure. Just like I probably know what will
| happen tomorrow, but I'll never be sure.
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(page generated 2023-09-01 23:00 UTC)