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I feel this article creates a problem which doesn’t exist. Tons of stuff is bound to disappear, and it won’t make any difference as humanity will not have any w

I feel this article creates a problem which doesn’t exist. Tons of stuff is bound to disappear, and it won’t make any difference as humanity will not have any way of processing these vast amounts of data retroactively.

arkitaip 6y ago
Why not? Processing power and storage will be so vast and cheap that you could simulate the entire tech stack regardless of the platform, data formats, etc.
- goodlinks 6y ago
  Is there some way to combine the internet archive with proof of stake crypto? ;)
  - boogies 6y ago
    Isn’t that what Filecoin is?
tomaszs 6y ago
Well maybe. However with social media taking so much time is everyone life a part of the life will also be forgotten. You could cut newspaper parts you liked, write a diary. No one told you you can't cut a piece of newspaper and preserve it. Or take a photo. It was easy. Now it is almost impossible to save your experience. Applications block copying text from messages eg. Instagram. Block you from downloading images eg. Google, and from saving videos (eg. Tiktok). Today technology leans towards blocking people of having a recall of what they see, hear and read online. It is hard to not have the feeling that we are losing something each day forever. Not being able to go back to something that i have experienced is a loss to me. I hope there will be some change around it, because I think that a person experiencing something has the right to preserve the experience. It was a default law. But now it is taken away from us. No one is however protesting not noticing some kind of very personal, natural freedom is slowly taken away from us. The freedom of having a memory.
- throwawayboise 6y ago
  You can still keep a diary. Online isn't real anyway. It's electronic bits; ephemeral by its nature.
- lupire 6y ago
  You can take a screenshot or photo of almost anything.
  - livueta 6y ago
    I think the parent does make a good point that it is getting harder to keep your hands on your own ephemera, especially in usable/meaningful forms (i.e. I'd say a GDPR dump of context-free comments isn't that meaningful). The example that comes to mind personally is chat logs: I have a fairly complete record of IRC conversations. It's not like I read them daily, but it is often nice to be able to refer back to, especially if I'm shooting the shit with friends or something and we can't remember who was actually the best at AoEII LAN. These logs were produced by my client(s) by default. That same friend group later migrated to Skype. I have no Skype logs at all, and there's a several-year gap in chat history before we ended up back on IRC. Could I have come up with some kind of logging solution? Probably, but I didn't, and now I'm sad about that and wish that the Skype client had been more aligned with my interests as a user, but I guess that's what I get for using proprietary software in the first place. So yes, sure, you can technically screenshot everything if you try hard enough, but the location/accessibility of digital ephemera has definitely moved away from end-users, toward corporations, as centralization advanced and clients regressed from user-agents to informers.
    - jonas21 6y ago
      People have been chatting with other people in real life for millennia with no logs or records. Being able to save chat logs is a bit of a quirk of the online world, isn't it?
      - tomaszs 6y ago
        I'd argue that having a memory of the past was and is one of the things people always aimed to have. It is part of being a human being. Even thousands of years ago people saved their stories on cave walls.
markstos 6y ago
"How do we memorialize the current moment when it's constantly disappearing?"

arkitaip 6y ago

Why not? Processing power and storage will be so vast and cheap that you could simulate the entire tech stack regardless of the platform, data formats, etc.

goodlinks 6y ago
Is there some way to combine the internet archive with proof of stake crypto? ;)
- boogies 6y ago
  Isn’t that what Filecoin is?

tomaszs 6y ago

Well maybe. However with social media taking so much time is everyone life a part of the life will also be forgotten. You could cut newspaper parts you liked, write a diary. No one told you you can't cut a piece of newspaper and preserve it. Or take a photo. It was easy. Now it is almost impossible to save your experience. Applications block copying text from messages eg. Instagram. Block you from downloading images eg. Google, and from saving videos (eg. Tiktok). Today technology leans towards blocking people of having a recall of what they see, hear and read online. It is hard to not have the feeling that we are losing something each day forever. Not being able to go back to something that i have experienced is a loss to me. I hope there will be some change around it, because I think that a person experiencing something has the right to preserve the experience. It was a default law. But now it is taken away from us. No one is however protesting not noticing some kind of very personal, natural freedom is slowly taken away from us. The freedom of having a memory.

throwawayboise 6y ago
You can still keep a diary. Online isn't real anyway. It's electronic bits; ephemeral by its nature.
lupire 6y ago
You can take a screenshot or photo of almost anything.
- livueta 6y ago
  I think the parent does make a good point that it is getting harder to keep your hands on your own ephemera, especially in usable/meaningful forms (i.e. I'd say a GDPR dump of context-free comments isn't that meaningful). The example that comes to mind personally is chat logs: I have a fairly complete record of IRC conversations. It's not like I read them daily, but it is often nice to be able to refer back to, especially if I'm shooting the shit with friends or something and we can't remember who was actually the best at AoEII LAN. These logs were produced by my client(s) by default. That same friend group later migrated to Skype. I have no Skype logs at all, and there's a several-year gap in chat history before we ended up back on IRC. Could I have come up with some kind of logging solution? Probably, but I didn't, and now I'm sad about that and wish that the Skype client had been more aligned with my interests as a user, but I guess that's what I get for using proprietary software in the first place. So yes, sure, you can technically screenshot everything if you try hard enough, but the location/accessibility of digital ephemera has definitely moved away from end-users, toward corporations, as centralization advanced and clients regressed from user-agents to informers.
  - jonas21 6y ago
    People have been chatting with other people in real life for millennia with no logs or records. Being able to save chat logs is a bit of a quirk of the online world, isn't it?
    - tomaszs 6y ago
      I'd argue that having a memory of the past was and is one of the things people always aimed to have. It is part of being a human being. Even thousands of years ago people saved their stories on cave walls.

markstos 6y ago

"How do we memorialize the current moment when it's constantly disappearing?"