6 ms·

One thing I find fascinating, and have not seen discussed, is what will happen to all this data in, say, a couple hundred years. We have tons of diaries from p

One thing I find fascinating, and have not seen discussed, is what will happen to all this data in, say, a couple hundred years. We have tons of diaries from people in 18th and 19th centuries, and they provide a uniquely intimate glimpse of life in the past. If there's any upside to our lives being recorded in such great detail, it's that it will be a treasure trove for our descendants long after we're gone.

zrail 7y ago
Assuming the hard drives survive and someone can read them. The advantage of paper is that you just have to understand the language. Digital archives require a lot of technology to read, even before you get to the point of understanding the language.
- tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
  Yeah there's definitely a chance that it won't survive. In which case the opposite conclusion is equally interesting, since this period would be an uncharacteristically Dark Age, with very little written paper to store as its memory. No one writes diaries anymore.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    I'd guess that there are still orders of magnitudes more paper diaries, newspapers and other records around than a few hundred years ago. General literacy is a very recent thing.
  - toastal 7y ago
    I mean we do that with dead languages... We piece them together given related langugages and clues in the grammar. I'm sure we can turn zeros and ones back into something readable... And our encryption will be so inadequate that everything we want hidden now from governments, et. al. will be readable in the diary sense later.
    - umanwizard 7y ago
      What makes you think current encryption is breakable?
  - decasia 7y ago
    Well, I still write diaries on paper. But I worry that one day they might get lost or destroyed and I wonder if I should scan them all, at least for the sake of having an offsite digital backup for the time being :)
close04 7y ago
> provide a uniquely intimate glimpse of life in the past. This highlights the biggest difference. Many of the diaries of olden days were written as relatively accurate depictions of actual events. Facebook "diaries" however are the exact opposite. They describe the life that person wished they had. While you may be able to extract useful information about society overall from this data 100 years from now, it will certainly not say much about an individual's life and those intimate glimpses you would expect.
- tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
  You're forgetting about private FB messages, lol.
codetrotter 7y ago
> If there's any upside to our lives being recorded in such great detail, it's that it will be a treasure trove for our descendants long after we're gone. And to them I say, please don’t judge us too harshly. People of the future, I wonder what your lives are like. I wonder if you’ve colonized space. I wonder if you’ve entered into other dimensions. I wonder if you can observe into the past. And peer into the future. To be able to guide yourselves into the branch of possible futures that you desire. It might sound ridiculous but I really do wonder. And I wish the answer was yes and that I got to experience it.
- TaupeRanger 7y ago
  And then you start thinking, "what even is this desire I feel for these future possibilities? Where does that come from and why is it so?" Will people in the future even share our current preferences? What happens to us when science advances to the point that we can hack our own reward functions (preferences)?
  - epicide 7y ago
    What happens when you set yourself to be disgusted[0] at the idea of changing your own preferences? [0]: I'm assuming you can also go the opposite way.
    - TaupeRanger 7y ago
      What happens when you set yourself to have no preferences?
ardy42 7y ago
> One thing I find fascinating, and have not seen discussed, is what will happen to all this data in, say, a couple hundred years. My prediction: If Facebook looses popularity like MySpace: it will hold onto dead people's profiles as long as possible, until it finally goes out of business or its skeleton team of developers makes a critical mistake. Their business at that point will basically be like that of domain squatters. They'll even start sharing things hidden from the public behind privacy settings. If Facebook remains popular, however, it will eventually aggressively purge the profiles of the dead to focus resources on more lucrative monetization opportunities of active consumers.
- tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
  I think you're probably right - for a period of time. But I'm imagining far into the future. 200-300 years.
- epicide 7y ago
  Even if Facebook-the-product dies[0], Facebook-the-company will continue to be around for a looong time. Even if they fall out of public favor, they have enough money, enough data, enough business connections, etc. to continue for a very long time [1]. Honestly, if somehow enough people actually manage to get mad enough at Facebook for it to potentially affect their bottom line, they would likely use Zuckerberg as a scapegoat and ditch him. People like to latch onto a single individual as the problem, so that stunt would probably placate a lot of people [2]. [0]: Even this seems very unlikely given how many deep ties they have into peoples' lives. Keep in mind that it is far from just a social networking tool or blogging platform. [1]: Hell, they probably have enough money and blackmail data to do whatever they want. Including blackmail. [2]: Witch hunts are more popular than ever :)
  - CharlesColeman 7y ago
    > they would likely use Zuckerberg as a scapegoat and ditch him IIRC, Zuckerberg has a controlling stake in Facebook through supervoting shares, so he's not getting ditched unless he wants to be ditched.
LeonM 7y ago
Interesting thought. But with the current rate at which we are becoming more and more concerned about our privacy, maybe we won't be in a situation where a site like Facebook can actually 'publish' the diaries. So possibly this information will remain forever locked-up, until some law forces us to delete this data, and it will be gone forever.
pastor_elm 7y ago
It's not facebook's right to allow anyone to have access to those accounts, especially once you and everyone you knew are dead.
SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
I look forward to historical articles being written about the tide pod challenge of 2016.
- tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
  You joke, but I honestly cannot imagine how our future generations will perceive us if they can look back and see that type of thing. It's easy to look back in the past and see the errors of our ancestors, but I don't know if there's a precedent for looking back and feeling completely unimpressed and underwhelmed. Which is how I imagine our descendants will feel.
  - TaupeRanger 7y ago
    Well one possibility is that they will be dealing with even wierder shit than Tide Pods (imagine the horrific possibilities of advanced virtual reality sims). Our current "errors" may seem mild by comparison.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      Or just that all this BS will be lost, when FB goes out of fashion, and be as relevant and accessible to future generations as AOL, MySpace, or old USENET threads are to us...
  - epicide 7y ago
    > I don't know if there's a precedent for looking back and feeling completely unimpressed and underwhelmed Survivorship bias. We only talk about the interesting things, regardless of whether it was recorded or not. Many decades had absolutely nothing of note[0] happen. [0]: At least nothing of note to people today.
- shpx 7y ago
  How many articles about jokes from 1913 have you read? Do you care? What makes you think future generations will care about yours?
kerng 7y ago
Digital data is more volatile then you think, unless actively archived a lot of it will just disappear when Facebook goes out of business. Look what happened with Myspace and what they deleted...
- int_19h 7y ago
  I suspect that a lot of Myspace content was scrapped, and is floating around in databases to this day. Storage is really, really cheap these days. Cheap enough that you can host Wikipedia and OpenStreetMaps in your garage if you wanted to. And this is before you even get to stuff like Amazon Glacier, for data that you don't know what to do with today, but which might be mineable tomorrow. I fully expect that any shred of personal information, down to comments, is going to be recorded somewhere. Not necessarily with public access, though, and almost certainly not to the public benefit.
arkades 7y ago
> One thing I find fascinating, and have not seen discussed, is what will happen to all this data in, say, a couple hundred years. That's odd. I see it brought up on HN quite frequently. And, frankly, I feel like the implicit tone is always that this data needs to be preserved to allow for the insights of future historians. Personally, I sit on the opposite side of that fence. The inquisition of future historians does not hold weight against the privacy and well-being of the now-living.
- lostphilosopher 7y ago
  Are people not writing in physical diaries to prevent future breeches of privacy? (Odd to think of Facebook etc. like that.) Or are people doing it out of convenience / least resistance? If so, are they cognizant of what this means for the longevity of the data? I'm not sure the future impact is an intentional choice...
- JudgeWapner 7y ago
  Nothing odd about being aware of the historical impact of our lives.
JudgeWapner 7y ago
There will be so much of it that it will just sound like noise to them. They'll probably have software that mines through petabytes of shitposts to find specific things but I doubt they will be impressed with any of us, even the most prescient or famous ones. Their software will classify the sentiment into canned personality types similar to INTJ, but redefined for internet personas. Nobody will read it manually because we're all just another permutation of "INT...Whatever" like the other 18 million people who posted the same ideas/emotions/sentiment. Kinda sad.
- 2bitencryption 7y ago
  some people are interested in the noise. someone will be interested. interested in you specifically? unlikely. but interested in the mundane lives of long-dead strangers? for sure. I frequent my local Goodwill, once a week. In the book section, there are always multiple school yearbooks. High school, university, middle school. Some very old (university in the 20's). I always take one on my way out. I like looking at the messages people wrote on the inside, and their signature, and then find their yearbook portrait to see what they looked like and what activities they did. I don't know why this gives me pleasure, but it does for some reason. What do I do with this growing pile of stranger's yearbooks in my closet? Well, that's a problem I'l deal with eventually...
gugagore 7y ago
You might enjoy this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel) and others that play on the idea of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age
- tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
  Interesting; I'll take a look. Thanks!
anderspitman 7y ago
I think about this a lot. There's the obvious archival problem, to ensure the data is preserved along with a machine to read it or instructions on how to build such a machine. But then there's the retrieval problem. I'm very interested in family history and genealogy. Every journal, every photo from even a couple generations back is like a priceless treasure. 100 years from now? Our great-grandkids' grandkids will have more data on us than they'll know what to do with. One of my long term projects I'd like to help tackle is to answer the question "How do you summarize a life?". I like to imagine a system similar to Superman's ice castle where you insert a digital artifact from your ancestor and an AI helps you sift through their data.
- int_19h 7y ago
  > to ensure the data is preserved along with a machine to read it or instructions on how to build such a machine You don't need to preserve the machine. You just need to be able to emulate it sufficiently close on then-current hardware. The nice thing about this approach is that if it's done right, then it scales more or less indefinitely, since you can run emulators inside other emulators. So long as at any given point we have one that covers the previous generation... This takes care of file formats and software. Maintaining compatibility with the physical medium on which data is archived is trickier, because you can't emulate the reader. But on the other hand, with digital data, you can just copy it over to the new medium. So, again, as long as the archives are regularly updated to keep up with the tech - not even current, just whatever is still available - we're good.
beautifulfreak 7y ago
I made a similar comment on HN last week and was downvoted, for reasons I can't fathom. I agree, it would be a valuable trove of info, an "objective history."

zrail 7y ago

Assuming the hard drives survive and someone can read them. The advantage of paper is that you just have to understand the language. Digital archives require a lot of technology to read, even before you get to the point of understanding the language.

tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
Yeah there's definitely a chance that it won't survive. In which case the opposite conclusion is equally interesting, since this period would be an uncharacteristically Dark Age, with very little written paper to store as its memory. No one writes diaries anymore.
- adrianN 7y ago
  I'd guess that there are still orders of magnitudes more paper diaries, newspapers and other records around than a few hundred years ago. General literacy is a very recent thing.
- toastal 7y ago
  I mean we do that with dead languages... We piece them together given related langugages and clues in the grammar. I'm sure we can turn zeros and ones back into something readable... And our encryption will be so inadequate that everything we want hidden now from governments, et. al. will be readable in the diary sense later.
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    What makes you think current encryption is breakable?
- decasia 7y ago
  Well, I still write diaries on paper. But I worry that one day they might get lost or destroyed and I wonder if I should scan them all, at least for the sake of having an offsite digital backup for the time being :)

close04 7y ago

> provide a uniquely intimate glimpse of life in the past. This highlights the biggest difference. Many of the diaries of olden days were written as relatively accurate depictions of actual events. Facebook "diaries" however are the exact opposite. They describe the life that person wished they had. While you may be able to extract useful information about society overall from this data 100 years from now, it will certainly not say much about an individual's life and those intimate glimpses you would expect.

tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
You're forgetting about private FB messages, lol.

codetrotter 7y ago

> If there's any upside to our lives being recorded in such great detail, it's that it will be a treasure trove for our descendants long after we're gone. And to them I say, please don’t judge us too harshly. People of the future, I wonder what your lives are like. I wonder if you’ve colonized space. I wonder if you’ve entered into other dimensions. I wonder if you can observe into the past. And peer into the future. To be able to guide yourselves into the branch of possible futures that you desire. It might sound ridiculous but I really do wonder. And I wish the answer was yes and that I got to experience it.

TaupeRanger 7y ago
And then you start thinking, "what even is this desire I feel for these future possibilities? Where does that come from and why is it so?" Will people in the future even share our current preferences? What happens to us when science advances to the point that we can hack our own reward functions (preferences)?
- epicide 7y ago
  What happens when you set yourself to be disgusted[0] at the idea of changing your own preferences? [0]: I'm assuming you can also go the opposite way.
  - TaupeRanger 7y ago
    What happens when you set yourself to have no preferences?

ardy42 7y ago

> One thing I find fascinating, and have not seen discussed, is what will happen to all this data in, say, a couple hundred years. My prediction: If Facebook looses popularity like MySpace: it will hold onto dead people's profiles as long as possible, until it finally goes out of business or its skeleton team of developers makes a critical mistake. Their business at that point will basically be like that of domain squatters. They'll even start sharing things hidden from the public behind privacy settings. If Facebook remains popular, however, it will eventually aggressively purge the profiles of the dead to focus resources on more lucrative monetization opportunities of active consumers.

tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
I think you're probably right - for a period of time. But I'm imagining far into the future. 200-300 years.
epicide 7y ago
Even if Facebook-the-product dies[0], Facebook-the-company will continue to be around for a looong time. Even if they fall out of public favor, they have enough money, enough data, enough business connections, etc. to continue for a very long time [1]. Honestly, if somehow enough people actually manage to get mad enough at Facebook for it to potentially affect their bottom line, they would likely use Zuckerberg as a scapegoat and ditch him. People like to latch onto a single individual as the problem, so that stunt would probably placate a lot of people [2]. [0]: Even this seems very unlikely given how many deep ties they have into peoples' lives. Keep in mind that it is far from just a social networking tool or blogging platform. [1]: Hell, they probably have enough money and blackmail data to do whatever they want. Including blackmail. [2]: Witch hunts are more popular than ever :)
- CharlesColeman 7y ago
  > they would likely use Zuckerberg as a scapegoat and ditch him IIRC, Zuckerberg has a controlling stake in Facebook through supervoting shares, so he's not getting ditched unless he wants to be ditched.

LeonM 7y ago

Interesting thought. But with the current rate at which we are becoming more and more concerned about our privacy, maybe we won't be in a situation where a site like Facebook can actually 'publish' the diaries. So possibly this information will remain forever locked-up, until some law forces us to delete this data, and it will be gone forever.

pastor_elm 7y ago

It's not facebook's right to allow anyone to have access to those accounts, especially once you and everyone you knew are dead.

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago

I look forward to historical articles being written about the tide pod challenge of 2016.

tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
You joke, but I honestly cannot imagine how our future generations will perceive us if they can look back and see that type of thing. It's easy to look back in the past and see the errors of our ancestors, but I don't know if there's a precedent for looking back and feeling completely unimpressed and underwhelmed. Which is how I imagine our descendants will feel.
- TaupeRanger 7y ago
  Well one possibility is that they will be dealing with even wierder shit than Tide Pods (imagine the horrific possibilities of advanced virtual reality sims). Our current "errors" may seem mild by comparison.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    Or just that all this BS will be lost, when FB goes out of fashion, and be as relevant and accessible to future generations as AOL, MySpace, or old USENET threads are to us...
- epicide 7y ago
  > I don't know if there's a precedent for looking back and feeling completely unimpressed and underwhelmed Survivorship bias. We only talk about the interesting things, regardless of whether it was recorded or not. Many decades had absolutely nothing of note[0] happen. [0]: At least nothing of note to people today.
shpx 7y ago
How many articles about jokes from 1913 have you read? Do you care? What makes you think future generations will care about yours?

kerng 7y ago

Digital data is more volatile then you think, unless actively archived a lot of it will just disappear when Facebook goes out of business. Look what happened with Myspace and what they deleted...

int_19h 7y ago
I suspect that a lot of Myspace content was scrapped, and is floating around in databases to this day. Storage is really, really cheap these days. Cheap enough that you can host Wikipedia and OpenStreetMaps in your garage if you wanted to. And this is before you even get to stuff like Amazon Glacier, for data that you don't know what to do with today, but which might be mineable tomorrow. I fully expect that any shred of personal information, down to comments, is going to be recorded somewhere. Not necessarily with public access, though, and almost certainly not to the public benefit.

arkades 7y ago

> One thing I find fascinating, and have not seen discussed, is what will happen to all this data in, say, a couple hundred years. That's odd. I see it brought up on HN quite frequently. And, frankly, I feel like the implicit tone is always that this data needs to be preserved to allow for the insights of future historians. Personally, I sit on the opposite side of that fence. The inquisition of future historians does not hold weight against the privacy and well-being of the now-living.

lostphilosopher 7y ago
Are people not writing in physical diaries to prevent future breeches of privacy? (Odd to think of Facebook etc. like that.) Or are people doing it out of convenience / least resistance? If so, are they cognizant of what this means for the longevity of the data? I'm not sure the future impact is an intentional choice...
JudgeWapner 7y ago
Nothing odd about being aware of the historical impact of our lives.

JudgeWapner 7y ago

There will be so much of it that it will just sound like noise to them. They'll probably have software that mines through petabytes of shitposts to find specific things but I doubt they will be impressed with any of us, even the most prescient or famous ones. Their software will classify the sentiment into canned personality types similar to INTJ, but redefined for internet personas. Nobody will read it manually because we're all just another permutation of "INT...Whatever" like the other 18 million people who posted the same ideas/emotions/sentiment. Kinda sad.

2bitencryption 7y ago
some people are interested in the noise. someone will be interested. interested in you specifically? unlikely. but interested in the mundane lives of long-dead strangers? for sure. I frequent my local Goodwill, once a week. In the book section, there are always multiple school yearbooks. High school, university, middle school. Some very old (university in the 20's). I always take one on my way out. I like looking at the messages people wrote on the inside, and their signature, and then find their yearbook portrait to see what they looked like and what activities they did. I don't know why this gives me pleasure, but it does for some reason. What do I do with this growing pile of stranger's yearbooks in my closet? Well, that's a problem I'l deal with eventually...

gugagore 7y ago

You might enjoy this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel) and others that play on the idea of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age

tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
Interesting; I'll take a look. Thanks!

anderspitman 7y ago

I think about this a lot. There's the obvious archival problem, to ensure the data is preserved along with a machine to read it or instructions on how to build such a machine. But then there's the retrieval problem. I'm very interested in family history and genealogy. Every journal, every photo from even a couple generations back is like a priceless treasure. 100 years from now? Our great-grandkids' grandkids will have more data on us than they'll know what to do with. One of my long term projects I'd like to help tackle is to answer the question "How do you summarize a life?". I like to imagine a system similar to Superman's ice castle where you insert a digital artifact from your ancestor and an AI helps you sift through their data.

int_19h 7y ago
> to ensure the data is preserved along with a machine to read it or instructions on how to build such a machine You don't need to preserve the machine. You just need to be able to emulate it sufficiently close on then-current hardware. The nice thing about this approach is that if it's done right, then it scales more or less indefinitely, since you can run emulators inside other emulators. So long as at any given point we have one that covers the previous generation... This takes care of file formats and software. Maintaining compatibility with the physical medium on which data is archived is trickier, because you can't emulate the reader. But on the other hand, with digital data, you can just copy it over to the new medium. So, again, as long as the archives are regularly updated to keep up with the tech - not even current, just whatever is still available - we're good.

beautifulfreak 7y ago

I made a similar comment on HN last week and was downvoted, for reasons I can't fathom. I agree, it would be a valuable trove of info, an "objective history."