8 ms·

You're right, let's burn the library down because one book has a liable chapter in it. This argument is so horrible as to be actively harmful to Archive's work

You're right, let's burn the library down because one book has a liable chapter in it. This argument is so horrible as to be actively harmful to Archive's work. Jason Scott is a god, and if we didn't have him, we'd have to invent him. WE DO NOT GET TO CHOOSE WHAT THE FUTURE FINDS INTERESTING. We live in the only point in human history where we can actually save all of humanity's knowledge and culture, and we can do so without having to worry about physical space or staff to work the "library." It's a remarkable time we live in, and yet, 99% of our society either doesn't care, thinks this work is stupid, or actively works against it through horrific copyright laws. We know more about how Rembrandt painted and lived than we do about how Atari 2600 programmers worked and lived. I can go to Rembrandt's house and see where he lived, where he painted, how he worked, where he slept and ate and mixed his paints and taught his classes. Atari's old HQ is just another office building. The source code to those games is mostly gone (thankfully, it's assembly and easier to disassemble). We need to save our culture and digital heritage, else we forget where we come from. Deleting some old tweets is one thing, but actively worrying about Archive's work is just harmful to us all. We need 10,000 more Archives, dammit. It's supremely important work that is helping stem the tide of lost culture due to stock market forces. Geocities is gone forever because Yahoo! didn't find it profitable. This cannot keep happening.

ballenf 7y ago
I’m not convinced it’s dangerous to explore whether there are benefits to ephemerality. I’m also not sure your Rembrandt example shows what you suggest it does. The average Atari 2600 programmer would be more equivalent to the hundreds of now unknown artists in Rembrandt’s time. The John Carmack’s of today will be remembered in detail with or without blanket archive efforts. Maybe, just maybe, Rembrandt’s Status in our minds is a result of generations of people each seeing the individual value in his work. That is, each generation does indeed get to decide what future generations remember. Or at least it used to be true until the digital age. Maybe the change is an improvement. But maybe not. And libraries are the epitome of what you’re fighting against. They are by definition works chosen by humans based on judgment calls of their perceived value. Let’s at least acknowledge that blanket archive efforts are a fundamental change in themselves and a departure from the human status quo for thousands of years. Then let’s debate whether the change is an unabated good.
- VonGuard 7y ago
  In 2008 I found a parcel of bare EPROMs at a flea market container 27 games. 1 of those games was Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park, and it was spread across 12 chips, each one showing a progressive state of development across 9 months. To my mind, this was the only known find of a vintage Atari 2600 game and its iterative development process. So, 30 years later, the only reason we had this snapshot is because someone found these chips and sold them at the flea. The current state of digital preservation is abhorrent. Those roms would have taken up less than 1/4 of a 5.25" floppy, but the company behind them never thought to preserve that information or data. Take2 Interactive republished BioShock in 2012. They couldn't find their source code. They didn't save it. They had to go machine to machine looking for it. The reissued game is not the same as the original. As a society, we don't place any value on this stuff, but the potential value of it cannot be understood until the future has occurred. Letting it vanish is a disservice to the future. In the past, if a book was published, it wasn't going to vanish if the publisher went out of business, there would simply be no new copies. In our digital online age, things vanish in seconds, days and hours. This is also a very different state of affairs. In the past we could not save everything, but everything didn't have a clock counting down from the end of the quarter over its head, counting the seconds until it is deleted. The Library of Congress tries to save everything. Yes, libraries weed the stacks and choose items to host. This is due to space concerns: they can't host everything ever. Digitally, they can, and many host reams of microfilm and old newspapers because they can. Libraries can, thanks to tech, now host every book ever, digitally, for very low costs. Copyright prevents that. This is an unabated good. Leaving things behind and forgetting them is how you get Tulsa Oaklahoma, or the Armenian Genocide denials. We don't get to choose what the future finds interesting, and for the first time in history, we do not have to. Why in the every loving fuck would you worry about that? Most likely, only for personal reasons. This is a humanity level problem. Your personal worries are irrelevant in 100 years when everyone who ever knew you is dead anyway. Geocities would be more interesting at that time, as a subject of study.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Library of Congress, British Library, Bibliothèque Nationale etc choose to save everything they are mandated to, and a fair bit extra besides. That includes everything published. They don't save their water cooler chats, personal letters and everything sent by post, everything said on the phone or Facebook, etc. The bar - perhaps found accidentally - seems quite important in deciding what must be archived, and what probably shouldn't.
sergiotapia 7y ago
This isn't twitter. Cool it with the caps and emojis
- uhhhhhhh 7y ago
  Caps and emoji's are more effective outside of twitter than they are in a limited size post...
- VonGuard 7y ago
  CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL! :)
gumby 7y ago
> We live in the only point in human history where we can actually save all of humanity's knowledge and culture, Because the the welter of proprietary, undocumented formats, media bitrot and the like we are actually moving away from such a point. Turns out historians may not be so upset. You can be a historian of early medieval France have a chance of reading 100% of the surviving documentation. Too much data can obscure the story. Of course historically you could get a PhD for compiling a concordance to Shakespeare, something that can now be done mechanically in seconds. Future historians could (and will) apply the same tools to today's surviving documentation. But I don't believe there'll be as much of it as you seem to think.
- ghaff 7y ago
  >Because the the welter of proprietary, undocumented formats, media bitrot and the like we are actually moving away from such a point. The best we can probably say is that it's different. We're capable of saving far more but, in practice, a lot of digital media is locked up in walled gardens and accounts that have to be paid for and require logins. It's presumably easier to save a bunch of photographs or videos in a way that they'll be accessible so long as key Internet sites or their successors are. A fire or flood probably won't destroy them. OTOH, unless you've taken affirmative steps to upload that media to the right place, it won't be serendipitously discovered in a shoebox some day in the future.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > Turns out historians may not be so upset. You can be a historian of early medieval France have a chance of reading 100% of the surviving documentation. Too much data can obscure the story. I don't understand this reasoning. Yes, more data = more work, but less data = more likely you're wrong.
  - gumby 7y ago
    Less data: less likelihood someone will challenge you before you get tenure. The incentives in academia are messed up.
    - 7y ago
tptacek 7y ago
This comment would be better without the first three paragraphs, which actively detract from what you're trying to say.
SkyBelow 7y ago
>You're right, let's burn the library down because one book has a liable chapter in it. It is more like, either you burn the library down or every thing you have written in your private journal is now available to be checked out by anyone. It really shouldn't be that way and I think we should fix the problem of holding people responsible for bad behavior in the past. But how do we draw lines (for example, what about holding people responsible for past crimes). >We need to save our culture and digital heritage, else we forget where we come from. I agree, but we also need to ensure this is done without costing individuals. Technology has advanced, but society has not. Out technology outpacing our culture has and will continue to hurt many people and we should try to find a way to fix it.
- ghaff 7y ago
  The Circle (both book and film) was, sadly, a largely botched attempt to explore issues like privacy, the power of tech companies, widespread surveillance, etc. Missed opportunity in that the book was only readable if you took it as a deliberately over the top "if this goes on" fable. And the film was mostly notable for how it squandered a top-notch cast.
- RonanTheGrey 7y ago
  It is appalling to me that the parent comment is being downvoted. Religious fervor indeed. The point being made is simply that saving every scrap of history including personal tracking and details that are normally LOST to history, is a sea-change in human history and shouldn't be looked at lightly. There is value in forgetting. What we forget, then is a very relevant question. "NEVER FORGET ANYTHING RAWR!" is not a useful point of view because it denies the very right to have a conversation on the subject. If you can't agree that I should have some say in what is remembered (or at least archived) about me or generated by me, there's not much we can talk about.
  - SkyBelow 7y ago
    It is also a matter of consent. And to make it even clearer, one just needs to think about leaked images. Should we not allow a person to delete such images leaked without their consent? 1,000 years from now archaeologist may have some academic interest and those involved and even generations of their descendants are long dead. But what about 1 year from now? Benefiting those 1000 years from now as the cost of those alive today is a hard position to justify, especially with such a blanket justification.
pergadad 7y ago
I think a better analogy than a library would be your average day in the office: would you want everything you say and do in the office recorded for eternity? Sure it would help, say, catch fraudsters, track responsibility and credit, allow sociologists fascinating analysis - but is that worth it? The >1GB of Google+ is a good example. Probably many interesting posts from people that are the core experts on topic X - and many nonsensical Twitter-like posts of people sharing whatever they encountered or thought that day.
at-fates-hands 7y ago
>> We live in the only point in human history where we can actually save all of humanity's knowledge and culture Playing devils advocate here for a moment. . . Considering we as humans learn little from our past, keeping all of this knowledge is a benefit to whom then? Some people who feel nostalgic about Sony's first walkman? Or maybe people using it for nefarious reasons? If humans continue to make the same historical mistakes over and over, what benefit does the human race gain from cataloging all this information? I would venture to guess, its more plausible it will be used against us instead of furthering our own culture. >> We know more about how Rembrandt painted and lived than we do about how Atari 2600 programmers worked and lived There is a huge difference between saving all of Rembrandt's stuff than it is some 22 year old college drop out programmer who created a video game in the hey days of long forgotten startup company. And yeah, there have been numerous documentaries, and articles written about Atari in those early days. Who would want to save a dilapidated roller rink under the auspices that a great and noble video game company used it as their HQ for a few years?? https://www.polygon.com/2018/7/6/17542154/atari-book-valley-of-genius-nolan-bushnell-cocaine-roller-skates https://www.polygon.com/2018/7/6/17542154/atari-book-valley-... But then this roller rink down the block became available: 10,000 square feet! I mean, we were just jam-packed, and we had people on roller skates actually running around on the roller-skate rink building Pongs. While I do think leaving certain things to the sands of time is a good thing, vacuuming up everything is just as worrisome. Are we going to be hoarders of a bygone technological past where a large majority of the "stuff" we save will have little, if any use to anybody anymore?? Having a background in anthropology, I find it fascinating there will be many generations of kids who leave no physical trace of their existence since a large majority will be in electronic form. Just imagine how people's lives are in a sort of suspended animation after passing away and having their Facebook pages live on forever. It's a bit hard to wrap your head around tbh.
- lubujackson 7y ago
  I would say there are several classifications of things worth saving through a broad net: - kindling sources, like a LiveJournal post that inspired Lin Manuel to write Hamilton (for a fake example) - early work of a future star, like imagine Lorde posted early songs to MySpace. This is already a clear issue as many posted songs have been deleted or lost for various reasons. - valuable things on shaky ground. Yahoo Groups, for the latest example. But I just saw on Reddit someone was looking for a deleted scene from Blair Witch Project that was supposedly the first video ever published on Amazon Prime Video... and now it has nearly vanished. That seems crazy to me from so many directions. - the value of the ephemeral. Gold and jewelry from old civilizations is nice but we know so much of how people actually lived by examining their garbage, scrap notes, broken bowls, etc. - the myth of permanence. We feel like 10 million people see a video, it is probably preserved. But there are no master tapes of any of this and so much of everything is interlinked and hard to piece together after the fact. What were people's tech stack when they were making MySpace? How big were people's hard drives? Did rhey share sonngs theough Kazaa or play them on MySpace directly? What was the state of Javascript then, what were the security issues or underground trends? How did songs propogate, where were they shared? Were people sending links in email or AIM, were people sharing links on Digg? This is stuff from like a decade or two and already you need to think like an archaeologist to have any sense of how the culture really existed because there were so many moving parts from year to year. - the value of datasets. Imagine putting some thought against the Geocities archive to see how HTML blink tags grew then fell in popularity over time. Or how a meme propagated, or analyze the link structure between groups of people or by topic or any make any number of interesting inquiries about how humans operate culturally in digital space and how interact socially through certain set of tools and limitations. There are very interesting possibilities here for understanding ourselves better as a species.
starsinspace 7y ago
> You're right, let's burn the library down because one book has a liable chapter in it. Jeez... You may want to re-read my comment. I have written no such thing, and it is not my opinion at all.
probably_wrong 7y ago
> You're right, let's burn the library down because one book has a liable chapter in it. I feel you got the comment backwards: a better analogy would be "if a used-books store full of Dan Browns were to burn down, would we regret the loss of maybe one chapter that has some value?" Your position seems to be "yes", but I wouldn't dismiss so easily the opposite view: that 90% of everything is crap, and that keeping everything forever "just in case" sounds surprisingly similar to hoarding. I do not oppose "purposeful archiving" - as someone mentioned, saving outgoing Wikipedia links seems smart. But my old twitter account, where I kept track of missed trains? There are better sources for that, and no one missed it when it was gone.
- RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
  It's almost impossible to evaluate what is of lasting value in the moment, while it is readily available. Imagine an author writes a paperback. It isn't very good, but a few people read it. Later, one of those people goes on to rework some of those ideas into their own script for a film. The film is a success. Years later, the scriptwriter mentions the paperback as an inspiration while giving an interview, but it's long out of print. To a biographer or a devoted fan of the film, this forgotten book, while of little value in and of itself has become a valuable part of a larger story. If it were culled when the contents of that used book store burned down, we would have lost something without realizing it. And that's how we lose most things. The only way to minimize this is to store as much as we can, in the hopes that we may find a use someday, and thankfully digital storage has made this very, very cheap. The opportunity cost is tiny, and the potential reward, given enough time, is unbounded.
  - josephwegner 7y ago
    But the opportunity cost is not tiny. This is literally a twitter thread asking for financial support. And I do recognize that the thousands of petabytes will likely be chump change to store in a decade... but necessarily the economies of storage will keep pace with the rate of content production. It will always be expensive to store everything. The question is, do we gain back this investment from future uses of these archives? I dunno. I’d be interested to hear what value archivists have gotten out of the archives, given it is decently old already.
GhettoMaestro 7y ago
> Atari's old HQ is just another office building. The source code to those games is mostly gone (thankfully, it's assembly and easier to disassemble). We need to save our culture and digital heritage, else we forget where we come from. Very good point!!! In my view the Internet Archive should be the Digital equivalent of the the role of the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). Shepherds of documentation, to give it a cool-ish sounding name.

ballenf 7y ago

I’m not convinced it’s dangerous to explore whether there are benefits to ephemerality. I’m also not sure your Rembrandt example shows what you suggest it does. The average Atari 2600 programmer would be more equivalent to the hundreds of now unknown artists in Rembrandt’s time. The John Carmack’s of today will be remembered in detail with or without blanket archive efforts. Maybe, just maybe, Rembrandt’s Status in our minds is a result of generations of people each seeing the individual value in his work. That is, each generation does indeed get to decide what future generations remember. Or at least it used to be true until the digital age. Maybe the change is an improvement. But maybe not. And libraries are the epitome of what you’re fighting against. They are by definition works chosen by humans based on judgment calls of their perceived value. Let’s at least acknowledge that blanket archive efforts are a fundamental change in themselves and a departure from the human status quo for thousands of years. Then let’s debate whether the change is an unabated good.

VonGuard 7y ago
In 2008 I found a parcel of bare EPROMs at a flea market container 27 games. 1 of those games was Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park, and it was spread across 12 chips, each one showing a progressive state of development across 9 months. To my mind, this was the only known find of a vintage Atari 2600 game and its iterative development process. So, 30 years later, the only reason we had this snapshot is because someone found these chips and sold them at the flea. The current state of digital preservation is abhorrent. Those roms would have taken up less than 1/4 of a 5.25" floppy, but the company behind them never thought to preserve that information or data. Take2 Interactive republished BioShock in 2012. They couldn't find their source code. They didn't save it. They had to go machine to machine looking for it. The reissued game is not the same as the original. As a society, we don't place any value on this stuff, but the potential value of it cannot be understood until the future has occurred. Letting it vanish is a disservice to the future. In the past, if a book was published, it wasn't going to vanish if the publisher went out of business, there would simply be no new copies. In our digital online age, things vanish in seconds, days and hours. This is also a very different state of affairs. In the past we could not save everything, but everything didn't have a clock counting down from the end of the quarter over its head, counting the seconds until it is deleted. The Library of Congress tries to save everything. Yes, libraries weed the stacks and choose items to host. This is due to space concerns: they can't host everything ever. Digitally, they can, and many host reams of microfilm and old newspapers because they can. Libraries can, thanks to tech, now host every book ever, digitally, for very low costs. Copyright prevents that. This is an unabated good. Leaving things behind and forgetting them is how you get Tulsa Oaklahoma, or the Armenian Genocide denials. We don't get to choose what the future finds interesting, and for the first time in history, we do not have to. Why in the every loving fuck would you worry about that? Most likely, only for personal reasons. This is a humanity level problem. Your personal worries are irrelevant in 100 years when everyone who ever knew you is dead anyway. Geocities would be more interesting at that time, as a subject of study.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Library of Congress, British Library, Bibliothèque Nationale etc choose to save everything they are mandated to, and a fair bit extra besides. That includes everything published. They don't save their water cooler chats, personal letters and everything sent by post, everything said on the phone or Facebook, etc. The bar - perhaps found accidentally - seems quite important in deciding what must be archived, and what probably shouldn't.

sergiotapia 7y ago

This isn't twitter. Cool it with the caps and emojis

uhhhhhhh 7y ago
Caps and emoji's are more effective outside of twitter than they are in a limited size post...
VonGuard 7y ago
CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL! :)

gumby 7y ago

> We live in the only point in human history where we can actually save all of humanity's knowledge and culture, Because the the welter of proprietary, undocumented formats, media bitrot and the like we are actually moving away from such a point. Turns out historians may not be so upset. You can be a historian of early medieval France have a chance of reading 100% of the surviving documentation. Too much data can obscure the story. Of course historically you could get a PhD for compiling a concordance to Shakespeare, something that can now be done mechanically in seconds. Future historians could (and will) apply the same tools to today's surviving documentation. But I don't believe there'll be as much of it as you seem to think.

ghaff 7y ago
>Because the the welter of proprietary, undocumented formats, media bitrot and the like we are actually moving away from such a point. The best we can probably say is that it's different. We're capable of saving far more but, in practice, a lot of digital media is locked up in walled gardens and accounts that have to be paid for and require logins. It's presumably easier to save a bunch of photographs or videos in a way that they'll be accessible so long as key Internet sites or their successors are. A fire or flood probably won't destroy them. OTOH, unless you've taken affirmative steps to upload that media to the right place, it won't be serendipitously discovered in a shoebox some day in the future.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> Turns out historians may not be so upset. You can be a historian of early medieval France have a chance of reading 100% of the surviving documentation. Too much data can obscure the story. I don't understand this reasoning. Yes, more data = more work, but less data = more likely you're wrong.
- gumby 7y ago
  Less data: less likelihood someone will challenge you before you get tenure. The incentives in academia are messed up.
  - 7y ago

tptacek 7y ago

This comment would be better without the first three paragraphs, which actively detract from what you're trying to say.

SkyBelow 7y ago

>You're right, let's burn the library down because one book has a liable chapter in it. It is more like, either you burn the library down or every thing you have written in your private journal is now available to be checked out by anyone. It really shouldn't be that way and I think we should fix the problem of holding people responsible for bad behavior in the past. But how do we draw lines (for example, what about holding people responsible for past crimes). >We need to save our culture and digital heritage, else we forget where we come from. I agree, but we also need to ensure this is done without costing individuals. Technology has advanced, but society has not. Out technology outpacing our culture has and will continue to hurt many people and we should try to find a way to fix it.

ghaff 7y ago
The Circle (both book and film) was, sadly, a largely botched attempt to explore issues like privacy, the power of tech companies, widespread surveillance, etc. Missed opportunity in that the book was only readable if you took it as a deliberately over the top "if this goes on" fable. And the film was mostly notable for how it squandered a top-notch cast.
RonanTheGrey 7y ago
It is appalling to me that the parent comment is being downvoted. Religious fervor indeed. The point being made is simply that saving every scrap of history including personal tracking and details that are normally LOST to history, is a sea-change in human history and shouldn't be looked at lightly. There is value in forgetting. What we forget, then is a very relevant question. "NEVER FORGET ANYTHING RAWR!" is not a useful point of view because it denies the very right to have a conversation on the subject. If you can't agree that I should have some say in what is remembered (or at least archived) about me or generated by me, there's not much we can talk about.
- SkyBelow 7y ago
  It is also a matter of consent. And to make it even clearer, one just needs to think about leaked images. Should we not allow a person to delete such images leaked without their consent? 1,000 years from now archaeologist may have some academic interest and those involved and even generations of their descendants are long dead. But what about 1 year from now? Benefiting those 1000 years from now as the cost of those alive today is a hard position to justify, especially with such a blanket justification.

pergadad 7y ago

I think a better analogy than a library would be your average day in the office: would you want everything you say and do in the office recorded for eternity? Sure it would help, say, catch fraudsters, track responsibility and credit, allow sociologists fascinating analysis - but is that worth it? The >1GB of Google+ is a good example. Probably many interesting posts from people that are the core experts on topic X - and many nonsensical Twitter-like posts of people sharing whatever they encountered or thought that day.

at-fates-hands 7y ago

>> We live in the only point in human history where we can actually save all of humanity's knowledge and culture Playing devils advocate here for a moment. . . Considering we as humans learn little from our past, keeping all of this knowledge is a benefit to whom then? Some people who feel nostalgic about Sony's first walkman? Or maybe people using it for nefarious reasons? If humans continue to make the same historical mistakes over and over, what benefit does the human race gain from cataloging all this information? I would venture to guess, its more plausible it will be used against us instead of furthering our own culture. >> We know more about how Rembrandt painted and lived than we do about how Atari 2600 programmers worked and lived There is a huge difference between saving all of Rembrandt's stuff than it is some 22 year old college drop out programmer who created a video game in the hey days of long forgotten startup company. And yeah, there have been numerous documentaries, and articles written about Atari in those early days. Who would want to save a dilapidated roller rink under the auspices that a great and noble video game company used it as their HQ for a few years?? https://www.polygon.com/2018/7/6/17542154/atari-book-valley-of-genius-nolan-bushnell-cocaine-roller-skates https://www.polygon.com/2018/7/6/17542154/atari-book-valley-... But then this roller rink down the block became available: 10,000 square feet! I mean, we were just jam-packed, and we had people on roller skates actually running around on the roller-skate rink building Pongs. While I do think leaving certain things to the sands of time is a good thing, vacuuming up everything is just as worrisome. Are we going to be hoarders of a bygone technological past where a large majority of the "stuff" we save will have little, if any use to anybody anymore?? Having a background in anthropology, I find it fascinating there will be many generations of kids who leave no physical trace of their existence since a large majority will be in electronic form. Just imagine how people's lives are in a sort of suspended animation after passing away and having their Facebook pages live on forever. It's a bit hard to wrap your head around tbh.

lubujackson 7y ago
I would say there are several classifications of things worth saving through a broad net: - kindling sources, like a LiveJournal post that inspired Lin Manuel to write Hamilton (for a fake example) - early work of a future star, like imagine Lorde posted early songs to MySpace. This is already a clear issue as many posted songs have been deleted or lost for various reasons. - valuable things on shaky ground. Yahoo Groups, for the latest example. But I just saw on Reddit someone was looking for a deleted scene from Blair Witch Project that was supposedly the first video ever published on Amazon Prime Video... and now it has nearly vanished. That seems crazy to me from so many directions. - the value of the ephemeral. Gold and jewelry from old civilizations is nice but we know so much of how people actually lived by examining their garbage, scrap notes, broken bowls, etc. - the myth of permanence. We feel like 10 million people see a video, it is probably preserved. But there are no master tapes of any of this and so much of everything is interlinked and hard to piece together after the fact. What were people's tech stack when they were making MySpace? How big were people's hard drives? Did rhey share sonngs theough Kazaa or play them on MySpace directly? What was the state of Javascript then, what were the security issues or underground trends? How did songs propogate, where were they shared? Were people sending links in email or AIM, were people sharing links on Digg? This is stuff from like a decade or two and already you need to think like an archaeologist to have any sense of how the culture really existed because there were so many moving parts from year to year. - the value of datasets. Imagine putting some thought against the Geocities archive to see how HTML blink tags grew then fell in popularity over time. Or how a meme propagated, or analyze the link structure between groups of people or by topic or any make any number of interesting inquiries about how humans operate culturally in digital space and how interact socially through certain set of tools and limitations. There are very interesting possibilities here for understanding ourselves better as a species.

starsinspace 7y ago

> You're right, let's burn the library down because one book has a liable chapter in it. Jeez... You may want to re-read my comment. I have written no such thing, and it is not my opinion at all.

probably_wrong 7y ago

> You're right, let's burn the library down because one book has a liable chapter in it. I feel you got the comment backwards: a better analogy would be "if a used-books store full of Dan Browns were to burn down, would we regret the loss of maybe one chapter that has some value?" Your position seems to be "yes", but I wouldn't dismiss so easily the opposite view: that 90% of everything is crap, and that keeping everything forever "just in case" sounds surprisingly similar to hoarding. I do not oppose "purposeful archiving" - as someone mentioned, saving outgoing Wikipedia links seems smart. But my old twitter account, where I kept track of missed trains? There are better sources for that, and no one missed it when it was gone.

RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
It's almost impossible to evaluate what is of lasting value in the moment, while it is readily available. Imagine an author writes a paperback. It isn't very good, but a few people read it. Later, one of those people goes on to rework some of those ideas into their own script for a film. The film is a success. Years later, the scriptwriter mentions the paperback as an inspiration while giving an interview, but it's long out of print. To a biographer or a devoted fan of the film, this forgotten book, while of little value in and of itself has become a valuable part of a larger story. If it were culled when the contents of that used book store burned down, we would have lost something without realizing it. And that's how we lose most things. The only way to minimize this is to store as much as we can, in the hopes that we may find a use someday, and thankfully digital storage has made this very, very cheap. The opportunity cost is tiny, and the potential reward, given enough time, is unbounded.
- josephwegner 7y ago
  But the opportunity cost is not tiny. This is literally a twitter thread asking for financial support. And I do recognize that the thousands of petabytes will likely be chump change to store in a decade... but necessarily the economies of storage will keep pace with the rate of content production. It will always be expensive to store everything. The question is, do we gain back this investment from future uses of these archives? I dunno. I’d be interested to hear what value archivists have gotten out of the archives, given it is decently old already.

GhettoMaestro 7y ago

> Atari's old HQ is just another office building. The source code to those games is mostly gone (thankfully, it's assembly and easier to disassemble). We need to save our culture and digital heritage, else we forget where we come from. Very good point!!! In my view the Internet Archive should be the Digital equivalent of the the role of the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). Shepherds of documentation, to give it a cool-ish sounding name.