Memories fade. Archives burn. All signal eventually becomes noise
- Reference: 1738139412
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/01/29/opinion_column_better_digital_archives_needed/
- Source link:
That informal archive represents only a small portion of my total output. I've been writing on and for the web pretty much since it came into existence outside of CERN, so have more than 30 years' worth of material online.
Those plastic tubs are therefore a proverbial iceberg that represent perhaps a tenth of my output, the rest of which is submerged on networks.
[1]
I had wanted to write about how to make our invisible digital lives more visible; then two horrible events – one personal, the other of global significance – reset my compass.
[2]
[3]
Earlier this month I lost my good friend [4]Tony Kastanos to lung cancer. I'd always known him as an artist – musician, painter, provocateur – but it wasn't until he was gone that I learned from his collaborators that he'd also released [5]three albums of [6]electronic music , [7]produced with collaborator Tim Gruchy, who showed me how to find it on iTunes and Spotify.
I'd known Tony for two decades, but he'd never told me about his electronica work. Nor had he told me about his award-winning stop-motion video animation, [8]Amerika Amerika .
[9]
Tim wondered aloud how to ensure that their collaborations would continue to be available. It's an essential question confronting any creative talent working in the digital era: How do we continue to offer our contributions to the generations that follow, when we're no longer around to spruik them?
The [10]Internet Archive has a pivotal role to play here – not just because of its immunity to the commercial mutability of a Spotify or an Apple Music, but because its very existence and name imply a promise to maintain a long-term archive of all online creative works. Tim – and all of Tony's other collaborators – could be putting copies of all their works into a Tony-Kastanos-archive-within-The-Archive. If that happens, my friend won't disappear completely.
Half an hour after I'd learned of Tony's passing, a friend in Los Angeles sent me a long, harrowing text message expressing fear the fires battering the city could claim their home.
[11]
A week later, they were relieved to find their home intact – but many others did not.
Within a few days, a story began to circulate about one of the structures that did not survive: The building housing the archive of the [12]Theosophical Society .
A century ago, Theosophists stood at the forefront of what today we'd call the "New Age" movement. Although the society's star has dimmed in the decades since, their influence on religion, philosophy and culture remains profound. Their archive housed most the papers and correspondence of the founders and main movers of the Theosophical Society – its genesis and history.
[13]It's all gone now.
[14]When your technological ghosts come back to haunt you, expect humbug
[15]Data is the new uranium – incredibly powerful and amazingly dangerous
[16]Copilot's crudeness has left Microsoft chasing Google, again
[17]AI has colonized our world – so it's time to learn the language of our new overlords
To my knowledge, archivists for the Theosophical Society had made little effort to preserve their archives in digital form. Nearly everything within the physical archive is likely now lost, because no one had foreseen the need to make a backup copy.
We all face oblivion: All the works of humanity will be overwhelmed by entropy, even when we print them upon [18]fancy digital microfiche , commit to " [19]century-scale storage " or beam them at the stars.
All signal eventually becomes noise.
Is that a bad thing? Only when oblivion comes prematurely – and could have been prevented. Tim O'Reilly summed it up well, when he said: "The greatest threat to the artist isn't piracy – it's obscurity."
A [20]wise post on Mastodon points out how we can rage against oblivion: "...you don't preserve digital media by stuffing the One True Version in an #archive. Make countless copies and scatter them to the wind. Make each a different format. You don't know which of them will still be readable next decade, so don't try to guess . That goes for analog media too. The Library of Alexandria contained copies. Many classic paintings only survived as copies. Copying is how life itself beats death. Embrace it."
Those plastic tubs now serve another purpose: a reminder that I need to find better digital archives ... and a photocopier. ®
Get our [21]Tech Resources
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[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Z5oKVfUkJZjo34YU3DpZaAAAAVA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://ariremix.com.au/vale-tony-kastanos-january-2025/
[5] http://www.grup.tv/HTML/music/2ABUs-TheDarkHand.html
[6] http://www.grup.tv/HTML/music/2ABUs-TABU.html
[7] http://www.grup.tv/HTML/music/2ABUs_warf-air.html
[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvODxIjj7Lo
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Z5oKVfUkJZjo34YU3DpZaAAAAVA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://archive.org
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Z5oKVfUkJZjo34YU3DpZaAAAAVA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosophical_Society
[13] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-12/landmarks-lost-palisades-and-eaton-fires
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/18/a_christmas_technicarol/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/20/data_is_the_new_uranium/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/09/copilot_vs_notebooklm/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/11/delvish_llm_language/
[18] https://group47.com/what-is-dots/
[19] https://lil.law.harvard.edu/century-scale-storage/
[20] https://wandering.shop/@felix/113640201967332352
[21] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Make copies...
The cost of copying ancient texts - and indeed paintings - was enormous. The decision to do it was dependent on the item already having been assessed as of value and whoever commissioned the copy would have already decided where to keep it.
We're in a somewhat different environment now. Records of ephemera far outnumber the records the classical world would have considered preserving. And (fires aside), they're more fragile - they need periodic format-shifting or recopying. And they need to be given an identifiable home where they will be preserved and found. All that, in the end, requires money and someone to make the effort.
So, before going to the trouble of making those copies, identify who's going to make that effort in future and where they're going to find the time and money. You might find you're spared the effort.
Long term digital documents
In the 1980s, I was running a project where we were legally required to keep data relating to health for 75 years - The likely maximum expected lifespan of the adult subjects. The data came off computers, so we looked at digital storage. IBM recommended the then-new WORM (Write Once Ready Many times) drives and disks. We bought some and diligently archived 3 copies, including one off-site. About 4 years later, they told us that their "secure forever" disks were failing.
I copied everything into simple plain text files and printed multiple copies onto acid-free archive-grade paper. We continued to archive onto paper and made sure we had digital copies on multiple hard drives. The organisation was privatized about 10 years later. I had left and suspect that the data was "quietly forgotten".
Backups, Off-site Copies, Testing....Sigh!!
Quote: ".....Make countless copies....."
Wise advice......but surely the main point of the piece is that many people (or organisations) don't even make ONE copy.
......or if they do make ONE copy, they keep that copy NEXT TO THE ORIGINAL!
......and on the subject of backups (of the digital kind), many people (or organisations) don't even TEST each backup to see if it is reliable......
So much material......so much risk.....so many poor procedures everywhere!
Your life's work is cactus
This seems to be an longstanding problem: bunch of brainiacs in ancient times had copies of their publications stored in the Great [1]Library of Alexandra and some barbarian came along and sacked the place. Should have used clay tablets. Or you thought you had everything down in hieroglyphics and some fundamentalist comes along and [2]bulldozes the place .
[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/yZ7qWob7Y9tcmztNA
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Bel
the Theosophical Society
. . has now met reality. And it bites.
An interesting article.
I will have no legacy to leave, I am but a mere business programmer. In the best case, in twenty years from now, someone will be tasked with reviewing some code and find my name in the author string.
I don't care. I have a loving wife and a daughter that adores me, and that is what is important to me.
If, however, I were an artist, I might have some issue with the legacy of my work. That said, if the Internet Archive is a Good Thing (TM) , apparently YouTube does a great job keeping artists' work alive, so all is not lost.
MS Fnd in a Lbry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Fnd_in_a_Lbry
And the actual text here: https://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/Ms_fnd_in_a_Lbry.html
DRM is the biggest threat to conservation
Almost every piece of media posted online these days is protected by some form of DRM. While the use of DRM is a massive discussion best saved for another day, one apparent downside here is that by preventing copies from being made, you prevent copies from being made!
As an artist, what is your priority? Making money now, or creating a legacy? The hard reality of life is, that more often than not you are forced to choose the former option. If you even get to make that choice yourself, because many artists, especially musicians, are bound to a publisher who will obviously make that decision for you.
I'd love to see a world where everyone can follow their passion, make every decision the way they want to, and live happily ever after, but the realist (or pessimist) in me has accepted that we simply can't have that.
And a little question to think about for yourself and maybe have an existential crisis about: Do you even want to be remembered? Why do you want that? Why should people remember you? There's a vast amount of people who turned into dust without a single trace of their existence surviving, what makes you special?
If thinking about those questions pissed you off, use it as a catalyst to make that change. Or, just like many of us, live your life to your happiest, and take every day as it comes. You don't need to be special, you just need to be yourself.