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It certainly makes you wonder about how this civilization is going to be viewed in the future. How are we going to leave traces of our civilization for future c

It certainly makes you wonder about how this civilization is going to be viewed in the future. How are we going to leave traces of our civilization for future civilizations to find and decode? I suspect that the riddles of Egyptian hieroglyphics are going to be pale in comparison to decoding DVD information, for example. Moreover, how pissed off are they going to be to go through all the work hacking our digital formats only to find "disposable content," as you so eloquently put?

erikpukinskis 16y ago
how pissed off are they going to be to go through all the work hacking our digital formats only to find "disposable content," as you so eloquently put? I may be understanding your point, and if so I apologize, but I think the "format rot" argument is a red herring. Yes, formats come and go. But as long as there's a sizable catalog of content in a given format, it's going to be readable. We can still read WAV files, RTF files and AVI files from decades ago. In fact, most computers can read these formats without even downloading any special tools. It's true that reading your VisiCalc spreadsheets off of an old tape backup is going to be a pain in the ass. But that was the freaking dawn of digital storage. Imagining that there is going to be the same upheaval in storage in the next 100 years as there was in the last 200 years is absurd. Things are stabilizing. Media are being abstracted away. Powerful catalogs of codecs and transcoders are being packaged up into easy-to-integrate services. I think there's a reasonable chance that YouTube videos will be viewable on all computing devices for the rest of time without us having to do any transcoding. Maybe Google will migrate to new formats like they're doing with WebM. Maybe Google will eventually sell YouTube off as a historical relic. Maybe they'll even shut it down and someone will suck out all the public video and store it somewhere else like they did with GeoCities. But acting like YouTube is the same as some tape backup, or an LP... it's just not. The technology is at a very different stage in it's life cycle.
- mirkules 16y ago
  My post was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and was kind of a lighthearted commentary on DRM and the state of content. Nonetheless, your argument (correct me if I'm wrong) is essentially that The Internet will automagically preserve all content, the way to decode it and reproduce it in the way it was originally intended to be consumed - forever. The implication in my post was that the internet won't last forever, that civilizations come and go, and maybe with the end of our civilization the internet will be lost, and with it the key to decoding all this information. I understand that the devices themselves will or already have the capability to preserve the data forever (for all practical purposes), but this is akin to being on a deserted island and saying you have 8 million songs on your iPod, but no earphones to play them with. On top of that, imagine that you go through all the trouble of figuring out how to make earphones from raw materials you find on this island, figuring out how the plug is supposed to work, how to charge the battery - only to find out that the songs are all crap.
  - erikpukinskis 16y ago
    the internet won't last forever, that civilizations come and go, and maybe with the end of our civilization the internet will be lost I actually think the internet is a kind of permaculture. It's like a new kingdom. We have animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, the bacteria, fungi, etc, and now the bit kingdom. And it's as robust as the other kingdoms. I doubt you could come up with any kind of vaguely plausible scenario where the internet disappeared completely.
jokermatt999 16y ago
It'd be an interesting project to go about creating a "digital Rosetta stone" for the purpose of decoding that information. The Voyager Golden Record came with instructions for creating a record player for it, but an entire computer would be far more complex, not to mention the actual programs for decoding the data. Difficult, but perhaps a good idea.

erikpukinskis 16y ago

how pissed off are they going to be to go through all the work hacking our digital formats only to find "disposable content," as you so eloquently put? I may be understanding your point, and if so I apologize, but I think the "format rot" argument is a red herring. Yes, formats come and go. But as long as there's a sizable catalog of content in a given format, it's going to be readable. We can still read WAV files, RTF files and AVI files from decades ago. In fact, most computers can read these formats without even downloading any special tools. It's true that reading your VisiCalc spreadsheets off of an old tape backup is going to be a pain in the ass. But that was the freaking dawn of digital storage. Imagining that there is going to be the same upheaval in storage in the next 100 years as there was in the last 200 years is absurd. Things are stabilizing. Media are being abstracted away. Powerful catalogs of codecs and transcoders are being packaged up into easy-to-integrate services. I think there's a reasonable chance that YouTube videos will be viewable on all computing devices for the rest of time without us having to do any transcoding. Maybe Google will migrate to new formats like they're doing with WebM. Maybe Google will eventually sell YouTube off as a historical relic. Maybe they'll even shut it down and someone will suck out all the public video and store it somewhere else like they did with GeoCities. But acting like YouTube is the same as some tape backup, or an LP... it's just not. The technology is at a very different stage in it's life cycle.

mirkules 16y ago
My post was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and was kind of a lighthearted commentary on DRM and the state of content. Nonetheless, your argument (correct me if I'm wrong) is essentially that The Internet will automagically preserve all content, the way to decode it and reproduce it in the way it was originally intended to be consumed - forever. The implication in my post was that the internet won't last forever, that civilizations come and go, and maybe with the end of our civilization the internet will be lost, and with it the key to decoding all this information. I understand that the devices themselves will or already have the capability to preserve the data forever (for all practical purposes), but this is akin to being on a deserted island and saying you have 8 million songs on your iPod, but no earphones to play them with. On top of that, imagine that you go through all the trouble of figuring out how to make earphones from raw materials you find on this island, figuring out how the plug is supposed to work, how to charge the battery - only to find out that the songs are all crap.
- erikpukinskis 16y ago
  the internet won't last forever, that civilizations come and go, and maybe with the end of our civilization the internet will be lost I actually think the internet is a kind of permaculture. It's like a new kingdom. We have animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, the bacteria, fungi, etc, and now the bit kingdom. And it's as robust as the other kingdoms. I doubt you could come up with any kind of vaguely plausible scenario where the internet disappeared completely.

jokermatt999 16y ago

It'd be an interesting project to go about creating a "digital Rosetta stone" for the purpose of decoding that information. The Voyager Golden Record came with instructions for creating a record player for it, but an entire computer would be far more complex, not to mention the actual programs for decoding the data. Difficult, but perhaps a good idea.