PCM, ASCII, and straight RGBA bitmap encodings aren’t going anywhere. By extension, derived formats like WAV, UTF-8, and word processor files and webpage HTML are mostly fine too. The formats are structurally simple enough that even if the associated file extensions were somehow to be forgotten, all you’d need to do to invent them again is hand the file to a bored nerd over the weekend.
I think you kinda got the BBC and NASA problems backwards. The BBC’s had a couple of prominent incidents where digital “preservation” that was supposed to be eternal couldn’t even be opened anymore after a couple of years, like their Domesday Book/Project application thingy. They’ve also lost a bunch of old shows, like early Dr. Who episodes, I think. NASA didn’t just forget how to read the Apollo tapes; they overwrote them to reuse the tapes, as was their standard practice at the time. The original signal and tapes were very HD (or analog), but most of the videos we have today are from the TV camera that they pointed at their own TV screen last-minute when they realized they didn’t have an adapter for broadcast— The equivalent of a grainy cell phone photo of a screenshot, basically.
The BBC and NASA incidents happened in an era before computers were a ubiquitous commodity product. So, everyone and their cat was basically inventing their own obscure single-implemention proprietary file formats at that time. Nowadays we have established technical standards, as well as formats that have already sorta stood the test of time based on their utility and simplicity— and millions of people who already know how to read them— so that particular vector for bitrot isn’t really as much of an issue anymore.
…That said, I think I sorta missed your point. What you’re really saying is that stewardship of digital records is much trickier and riskier than stewardship of physical records— and that results in stuff being lost. And that is absolutely true.
There is a will but there aren’t enough people with enough brain power to actually do the steps needed.
Should it endure? I don’t know, maybe the last few decades should be forgotten.
Crazy how a single event sometimes reminds people of bigger problems, huh?
Digital media, where we store basically everything we care about, is hugely, hugely volatile, unreliable, and fragile. But you never notice it until you’re reminded of it, and then you really notice it. This story reminded people of it.
The reminder to stay grounded is probably also healthy, but I do think you’re missing the point of this comment thread.
Many of the most culturally significant and creatively valuable works of literature, film, painting, and other forms of art and even science and engineering throughout history were widely panned, ridiculed, or simply unknown by their contemporaries.
“Will to maintain” comes from human people. And frankly, we’re vacillating, self-destructive, pleasure-seeking idiots with furthermore awfully finite practical limitations about what we can and want to have the will to do.
Lack of human eyes on something at a particular moment in time does not at all imply lack of its innate value. It doesn’t even guarantee lack of human eyes on it at a later date. Imagine if Da Vinci’s private notebooks, or Lovelace’s programs, or Van Gogh’s paintings, or Fermat’s humblebrag, or Melville’s writing and Dickinson’s poetry, or even Anne Frank’s diary, were saved on MicroSD instead of as physical hardcopy.
If there is a will to maintain it, it will endure. If there is no will, should it endure?
“Everything dies unless significantly effort and resources are constantly expended to maintain it” … Is not a world that I think I would prefer to live in.
…It would be an empty world and yet a violent world, filled with only the most trite and self-serving patterns designed and evolved to extract a profit in the briefest moment before they vanish. Even the stuff that does get “maintained” would have no fixed form, no verifiable truth, and no shared cultural experience or memory and heritage— Think of the streaming services that edit a film after it’s already been released, and imagine doing that to something like, E.G., Citizen Kane. Many of the things that we take for granted today— and probably most of our sense of cultural permanence, heritage, continuity, and memory— Might not really be possible in such a world.
And frankly, that’s going to bleed over into our politics too. Focusing exclusively on the single instant of the present because you no longer really have access to the past is a great way to make lots of selfish, impulsive decisions with disastrous consequence. It might even cause some degree of technological and cultural stagnation, as due to both psychological preferences and economic inequities, “will to maintain” is probably going to be heavily biased towards things that are already part of the status quo.
Physical media is at least somewhat inherently stable without constant maintenance on culturally relevant timescales, but digital media isn’t. At the same time that digital information technologies allow vastly greater quantities of valuable information to be assembled and disseminated, they also provide no practical way of passively preserving basically any of it. The invention of writing is fundamental to civilization, but the way it works is changing. Compared to the previous balance of capacities, we are now culturally capable of experiencing much, much more than we were before, but guaranteed to remember basically none of it— This is dangerous, or at least concerning and troubling.
Life is the perpetual fight against entropy, in all its forms. Meaningful information requires a lot of effort, work, insight, and feeling to put into words and pictures. Letting it be forgotten means forgetting who and what and why you are— Just because you can’t spare the CPUs and the technicians to keep its server up.
This comment thread wasn’t about that one videographer. It was about backup techniques and data preservation practices in general, and worrying trends in that direction.
OP: I’ve been telling people for years that the entire 21st century is at risk of being a lost century.
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The Apollo mission data and BBC TV recordings weren’t considered important enough at the time to preserve them, it wasn’t until decades later that people realized they were but by then the BBC had destroyed or overwritten much of them and NASA had forgotten how to read much of the data. Then there was the notorious loss of many master recordings by great artists in a fire because the company was just too cheap and lazy to store them properly.
PCM, ASCII, and straight RGBA bitmap encodings aren’t going anywhere. By extension, derived formats like WAV, UTF-8, and word processor files and webpage HTML are mostly fine too. The formats are structurally simple enough that even if the associated file extensions were somehow to be forgotten, all you’d need to do to invent them again is hand the file to a bored nerd over the weekend.
I think you kinda got the BBC and NASA problems backwards. The BBC’s had a couple of prominent incidents where digital “preservation” that was supposed to be eternal couldn’t even be opened anymore after a couple of years, like their Domesday Book/Project application thingy. They’ve also lost a bunch of old shows, like early Dr. Who episodes, I think. NASA didn’t just forget how to read the Apollo tapes; they overwrote them to reuse the tapes, as was their standard practice at the time. The original signal and tapes were very HD (or analog), but most of the videos we have today are from the TV camera that they pointed at their own TV screen last-minute when they realized they didn’t have an adapter for broadcast— The equivalent of a grainy cell phone photo of a screenshot, basically.
The BBC and NASA incidents happened in an era before computers were a ubiquitous commodity product. So, everyone and their cat was basically inventing their own obscure single-implemention proprietary file formats at that time. Nowadays we have established technical standards, as well as formats that have already sorta stood the test of time based on their utility and simplicity— and millions of people who already know how to read them— so that particular vector for bitrot isn’t really as much of an issue anymore.
…That said, I think I sorta missed your point. What you’re really saying is that stewardship of digital records is much trickier and riskier than stewardship of physical records— and that results in stuff being lost. And that is absolutely true.
There is a will but there aren’t enough people with enough brain power to actually do the steps needed. Should it endure? I don’t know, maybe the last few decades should be forgotten.
Mistakes are usually the stuff that should be remembered
Fair
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Crazy how a single event sometimes reminds people of bigger problems, huh?
Digital media, where we store basically everything we care about, is hugely, hugely volatile, unreliable, and fragile. But you never notice it until you’re reminded of it, and then you really notice it. This story reminded people of it.
The reminder to stay grounded is probably also healthy, but I do think you’re missing the point of this comment thread.
Many of the most culturally significant and creatively valuable works of literature, film, painting, and other forms of art and even science and engineering throughout history were widely panned, ridiculed, or simply unknown by their contemporaries.
“Will to maintain” comes from human people. And frankly, we’re vacillating, self-destructive, pleasure-seeking idiots with furthermore awfully finite practical limitations about what we can and want to have the will to do.
Lack of human eyes on something at a particular moment in time does not at all imply lack of its innate value. It doesn’t even guarantee lack of human eyes on it at a later date. Imagine if Da Vinci’s private notebooks, or Lovelace’s programs, or Van Gogh’s paintings, or Fermat’s humblebrag, or Melville’s writing and Dickinson’s poetry, or even Anne Frank’s diary, were saved on MicroSD instead of as physical hardcopy.
“Everything dies unless significantly effort and resources are constantly expended to maintain it” … Is not a world that I think I would prefer to live in.
…It would be an empty world and yet a violent world, filled with only the most trite and self-serving patterns designed and evolved to extract a profit in the briefest moment before they vanish. Even the stuff that does get “maintained” would have no fixed form, no verifiable truth, and no shared cultural experience or memory and heritage— Think of the streaming services that edit a film after it’s already been released, and imagine doing that to something like, E.G., Citizen Kane. Many of the things that we take for granted today— and probably most of our sense of cultural permanence, heritage, continuity, and memory— Might not really be possible in such a world.
And frankly, that’s going to bleed over into our politics too. Focusing exclusively on the single instant of the present because you no longer really have access to the past is a great way to make lots of selfish, impulsive decisions with disastrous consequence. It might even cause some degree of technological and cultural stagnation, as due to both psychological preferences and economic inequities, “will to maintain” is probably going to be heavily biased towards things that are already part of the status quo.
Physical media is at least somewhat inherently stable without constant maintenance on culturally relevant timescales, but digital media isn’t. At the same time that digital information technologies allow vastly greater quantities of valuable information to be assembled and disseminated, they also provide no practical way of passively preserving basically any of it. The invention of writing is fundamental to civilization, but the way it works is changing. Compared to the previous balance of capacities, we are now culturally capable of experiencing much, much more than we were before, but guaranteed to remember basically none of it— This is dangerous, or at least concerning and troubling.
Life is the perpetual fight against entropy, in all its forms. Meaningful information requires a lot of effort, work, insight, and feeling to put into words and pictures. Letting it be forgotten means forgetting who and what and why you are— Just because you can’t spare the CPUs and the technicians to keep its server up.
deleted by creator
This comment thread wasn’t about that one videographer. It was about backup techniques and data preservation practices in general, and worrying trends in that direction.