sometimes i think about the internet. we were promised, or rather warned that the internet lasts forever. nothing ever truly goes away. but that's wrong. and unlike a lot of popular myths about information storage and technology, it isn't the product of some multimillion dollar marketing scheme that we believe this. it's the fact that, as humans, we are uncomfortable with the loss of knowledge.
there's a concept called "information entropy". basically, the more complicated and alien a concept is to us (or whatever system is processing it), the more information and data is needed to understand it, so it has higher information entropy. for example: imagine one of the infamous tumblr comics. rats in a subway station, not being used to receiving love. these things are high entropy. we need the entirety of these things to know what they are and to understand them. if i showed you a random panel of the rats in a subway station comic, unless you were already personally familiar with the whole work, you wouldn't know what it was. in contrast, something like Loss, which has been twisted into probably thousands if not tens of thousands of formats and versions, is low entropy. even a simple 7 lines can convey it, because it is so entrenched in people's minds. another example of low entropy is a lot of literary themes that draw on aspects of the human experience. these are low entropy because most every person that reads them has already experienced the feelings that it draws upon.
the concept of information entropy is one that humans are fundamentally not wired to understand. because our own brains are subject to this as well. memories are not a lossless compression format. they are imperfect. we forget details, or tack on imagined pieces to fill in gaps. hell, we don't even remember actual events, save the first time we think abt them afterwards. most of the time (with a few exceptions), we remember the last time we remembered something. it's like repeatedly compressing a jpeg until it becomes a blur of pixels. eventually, we forget.
eventually, the file with become so shredded by compression that we can no longer recognize it. and that's more than a little scary for us.
