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Bret expresses uneasiness about accepting that the web and the world that uses it should have permanent memory. My perspective is one that falls more in line w

Bret expresses uneasiness about accepting that the web and the world that uses it should have permanent memory. My perspective is one that falls more in line with efforts like the Internet Archive: save it all, wholesale. He mentions technical solutions for enforcing ephemerality, but under the guise of preserving ephemerality. The problem with this is twofold: Re preserving: The ephemerality guarantee was never there. I've been watching The Americans. (Side note: good show.) If early 1980s Henry or Paige wanted to spend all evening talking on the phone and keep a recorded copy of their conversations, they could have. Tape recorders existed. If something interesting was said, and they realized they wanted to keep it on record after the fact, they could have written it in their journals. The end of ephemerality began long ago, before either the writers of this comment or the linked article were born, and before our Paige and Henry were born into their fictional universe. Re enforcing: This ephemerality guarantee can't exist. The analog hole is inescapable. If I understand correctly, Snapchat exists to allow expiry of content and even place preconditions on sharing, such as who it can be shared with when using the app's own sharing mechanism. This isn't enforcing a standard for ephemerality that has been lost. It's attempting to enforce a standard for ephemerality that never existed; it exploits the properties of digital transmission to synthesize something that doesn't and can't exist in the analog world. And failing. Because the digital world still has to interface with us through our analog one. So for all the effort that has gone into trying to make Snapchat's protections work, those efforts can be circumvented by something as simple as a 10 year old who can operate a camera or just possesses the ability to recount what he or she has seen or heard. "Should the web remember, and should we use a medium that has permanent memory for so much of our business?" are the wrong questions, and trying to answer them is a distraction.

Osmium 11y ago
> save it all, wholesale Is this even feasible now? When so much of the web depends on backend logic? Or transient, proprietary technologies?
mindslight 11y ago
> If early 1980s Henry or Paige wanted to spend all evening talking on the phone and keep a recorded copy of their conversations, they could have The key word being wanted. Most forms of person-to-person expression were default ephemeral. And failing that (eg a written letter), generally required explicit copying. Contrast with an email - by the time you even read it, how many copies have been made and where do they reside? I completely agree about "enforcement" being laughable, but there is room for parties voluntarily agreeing to not permanently record things. It can even be beneficial to a would-be recorder (eg legal discovery). Of course it can be quite beneficial to defect. But that calculus may even change as non-signed logs start to hold less weight (eg OTR's auto-repudiation). However, none of that really applies for explicit publishing mediums like the web. The next generation of content-addressable systems will be ultimately based on persistent data structures, with garbage collection of older versions only being necessary as a storage optimization.

Osmium 11y ago

> save it all, wholesale Is this even feasible now? When so much of the web depends on backend logic? Or transient, proprietary technologies?

mindslight 11y ago

> If early 1980s Henry or Paige wanted to spend all evening talking on the phone and keep a recorded copy of their conversations, they could have The key word being wanted. Most forms of person-to-person expression were default ephemeral. And failing that (eg a written letter), generally required explicit copying. Contrast with an email - by the time you even read it, how many copies have been made and where do they reside? I completely agree about "enforcement" being laughable, but there is room for parties voluntarily agreeing to not permanently record things. It can even be beneficial to a would-be recorder (eg legal discovery). Of course it can be quite beneficial to defect. But that calculus may even change as non-signed logs start to hold less weight (eg OTR's auto-repudiation). However, none of that really applies for explicit publishing mediums like the web. The next generation of content-addressable systems will be ultimately based on persistent data structures, with garbage collection of older versions only being necessary as a storage optimization.