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Every single conversation before 1859 between any 2 individuals who were not literate has been lost. While I decry the unnecessary loss of this record (which G

by mcherm 3y ago

Every single conversation before 1859 between any 2 individuals who were not literate has been lost. While I decry the unnecessary loss of this record (which Google maliciously chose not to offer to archivists, knowing full well that archivists would choose to preserve them if given the opportunity), we are actually living in the BEST recorded era of history, because only now have certain kinds of preservation become possible.

tekchip 3y ago
Could you expand some more on this? Short of active curation of small segments of online, deemed important, snapshots kept alive by constant maintenance (I wonder what the internet archives drive failure rates look like), there isn't a digital medium readily available (to the masses) yet that can survive 100+ years while also storing a meaningful amount of information. There are research efforts like Microsofts crystal thing. But so far no real winners.
- Kye 3y ago
  Not the person you replied to, but: Documents rarely survive just by being physically durable. They survive first by people making an effort to preserve them. Deja News might be the most complete archive, but it's not the only effort to preserve Usenet. For example: https://archive.org/details/archiveteam-googlegroups https://archive.org/details/archiveteam-googlegroups It's a roundabout way to do it, but probably includes enough context on what's missing for a historian to dig into other archives to find it. History is like RAID: given enough parity information, you can reconstruct much of what's missing. That's how we know so many lost texts exist, and occasionally find them: stuff we do have references them and sometimes offers clues on where to find it. Digital information in particular benefits from getting smaller relative to available storage size. Running a Usenet server used to be a huge financial burden. Now I could hold most of it on a keychain. This makes replicating it across the planet to resist the chaos of human nature easier. It might die in one place, but it's also somewhere else. It would take a world-ending event to wipe out anything you might find in /r/DataHoarder.
  - doubloon 3y ago
    this is why i disagree with mcherm. we live in an anti-intellectual age where people seek to destroy information. Aaron Swartz and Alexandra Elbakyan are treated like criminals, while billionaires who abuse the legal system to silence critics are treated like intellectual heroes.
- mcherm 3y ago
  Active curation IS an excellent way to maintain information. Drive failure rates are the kind of thing that archivists can easily measure (and appropriate amounts of redundant storage can nearly eliminate data loss).
prepend 3y ago
And isn’t present day so much better? I don’t understand your comment. Should we not mourn death of 1,000 because many others died, routinely, in the past? This material is easy to maintain, and presents a new wealth of noise and communication the world has never known. Dejanews was pretty stable until google bought them and them destroyed them. Not cool, but it’s a free world.
- mcherm 3y ago
  > I don’t understand your comment. It was in response to the parent comment stating this: > I'd bet more information has been lost in the past 10 years than all of human history has created before it I believe that more information is being preserved for historians now than ever before, and yet even so we should decry senseless destruction of early internet history.

by mcherm 3y ago

tekchip 3y ago

Could you expand some more on this? Short of active curation of small segments of online, deemed important, snapshots kept alive by constant maintenance (I wonder what the internet archives drive failure rates look like), there isn't a digital medium readily available (to the masses) yet that can survive 100+ years while also storing a meaningful amount of information. There are research efforts like Microsofts crystal thing. But so far no real winners.

Kye 3y ago
Not the person you replied to, but: Documents rarely survive just by being physically durable. They survive first by people making an effort to preserve them. Deja News might be the most complete archive, but it's not the only effort to preserve Usenet. For example: https://archive.org/details/archiveteam-googlegroups https://archive.org/details/archiveteam-googlegroups It's a roundabout way to do it, but probably includes enough context on what's missing for a historian to dig into other archives to find it. History is like RAID: given enough parity information, you can reconstruct much of what's missing. That's how we know so many lost texts exist, and occasionally find them: stuff we do have references them and sometimes offers clues on where to find it. Digital information in particular benefits from getting smaller relative to available storage size. Running a Usenet server used to be a huge financial burden. Now I could hold most of it on a keychain. This makes replicating it across the planet to resist the chaos of human nature easier. It might die in one place, but it's also somewhere else. It would take a world-ending event to wipe out anything you might find in /r/DataHoarder.
- doubloon 3y ago
  this is why i disagree with mcherm. we live in an anti-intellectual age where people seek to destroy information. Aaron Swartz and Alexandra Elbakyan are treated like criminals, while billionaires who abuse the legal system to silence critics are treated like intellectual heroes.
mcherm 3y ago
Active curation IS an excellent way to maintain information. Drive failure rates are the kind of thing that archivists can easily measure (and appropriate amounts of redundant storage can nearly eliminate data loss).

prepend 3y ago

And isn’t present day so much better? I don’t understand your comment. Should we not mourn death of 1,000 because many others died, routinely, in the past? This material is easy to maintain, and presents a new wealth of noise and communication the world has never known. Dejanews was pretty stable until google bought them and them destroyed them. Not cool, but it’s a free world.

mcherm 3y ago
> I don’t understand your comment. It was in response to the parent comment stating this: > I'd bet more information has been lost in the past 10 years than all of human history has created before it I believe that more information is being preserved for historians now than ever before, and yet even so we should decry senseless destruction of early internet history.