What happens when the world’s knowledge is held in a quasi-public square owned by a private company that could soon go out of business?
Jesus, I hadn’t even thought of this, but of course.
This is something that historians have been warning about for a couple of decades. How much of our history was not just on Twitter, but on MySpace, on blogs and web sites that came down after a few years, on e-mail, on texts. None of that leaves a record. Once the file is deleted, the server shut down and scrapped, the backup disks decay into being unreadable junk, that history is gone.
Does anyone remember when Obama and Clinton each held town hall campaign events on MySpace? Good luck finding anything about those now other than some news articles that say they happened. How many business zoom calls have formal meeting minutes taken? We are not saving histories. We aren’t even writing letters. I’m as guilty as anyone. My art is online and kept in the cloud. I make my Christmas Card every year, but I haven’t printed and mailed one in over a decade. It’s all sent electronically. Meaning that a generation from now no one will remember.
So the problem is bigger than Twitter. We are now a couple of decades into an age that will not leave any detailed historical record.
That is not good.
In pseudo and acadamic circles this has routinely been called the ‘digital dark age’, I even wrote on the subject a few years ago but can’t find that article right now. [There is even a Wikipedia article on the concept] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age#:~:text=The%20digital%20dark%20age%20is,technologies%20evolve%20and%20data%20decay).
It’s thought this might just be a black spot of knowledge, there are organizations working to stop this — archival websites primarily, but these are not able to penetrate all these corporate gated gardens, where paywalls, sign up walls, and more block access to. There is an ongoing campaign by megacorps to shutdown as many archival sites as possible.
This coupled with the fallibility of hard drives, CDs (make sure to back them up! They only have a 20-30 year lifetime!), and more and there is a chance that even though there is more information than ever before, more primary and secondary sources than ever, we may become just a strange blank spot in societal and cultural history. Digital decay is a terrifying concept that we are already beginning to live through.
@xkcd-for-that
This is exactly what I’ve been saying. It’s a loss of history. And, given how important it has been for activists of all sorts, it will be a loss for the future as well.
Star Trek yet again being accurate about future history (Picard saying “little is known about this era (the early 21st century) because much of the digital records are gone.”)
Funny that. I thought the same thing a week ago: that press archives, old photos on defunct social media and image hosting sites, forum posts, all that is disappearing.
For example, thirty years of old articles from the “NIE” weekly newspaper just went f00f about two-three years ago, because the paper’s site was redesigned and they just stopped hosting the archive on a public-facing server. This is particularly damning, as NIE often has controversial takes that nobody dares to challenge as untrue, and documented the fuckups of the entire political class without taking sides, ever since the communism fell here.
For major newspapers and news sites, it’s even worse. The articles aren’t even indexed on Google most of the time because they’re paywalled to shit, and have a lifetime of five years tops. So if you want an exact quote from an interview made in 2005 or so, you are not going to find it.
I ran four different political blogs on various platforms and they’re all gone forever because they weren’t profitable enough for the platform owners. Even worse, half of those were owned by major media conglomerates, so you can easily figure out that “profitability” was not a concern for them, not a genuine one.
Your old photos from early social media sites that went under? Also gone. A decade or two of your life just went f00f, and I don’t think you have backups of those photos on a memory card or hard drive.
This is very much tied to the enshittification of internet - basically, the companies stopped caring about users because it’s not where the money is. And the whole cycle continues, as you can see - as Manbaby McEmeraldmine furiously curbstomps Twitter into oblivion, whatever you posted there will also be gone.
Addendum because of two things:
First thing, I fished out a memory card I haven’t used since a decade from my previous camera and half of the photos can’t be read. Like, the thing is starting to decay and I could only recover a handful of photos I took, the rest went f00f for good.
Second thing: I ran this post, along with several others, through NotebookLM, and the talk show, while discussing this post, jumped to another one where I mentioned proprietary file formats, and that reminded me of the BBC Domesday Project. In short: it was a project undertaken in the mid-80s to digitize photos and video materials from the UK, released on two LaserDiscs and intended to run on a very specific computer model named Acorn BBC Master AIV. All of that is obsolete now, so people had to reverse-engineer and emulate an absolute shitton of hardware and software to access that data and convert them to more modern formats.
But at least those discs still exist, are still available and attempts at saving their contents weren’t halted by corporate C&D letters, unlike the fuckery that’s going on with Hachette’s hatchetmen targeting the Internet Archive. It’s like our technical literacy, our knowledge is being murdered for profit.
