>> We live in the only point in human history where we can actually save all of humanity's knowledge and culture
Playing devils advocate here for a moment. . .
Considering we as humans learn little from our past, keeping all of this knowledge is a benefit to whom then? Some people who feel nostalgic about Sony's first walkman? Or maybe people using it for nefarious reasons? If humans continue to make the same historical mistakes over and over, what benefit does the human race gain from cataloging all this information? I would venture to guess, its more plausible it will be used against us instead of furthering our own culture.
>> We know more about how Rembrandt painted and lived than we do about how Atari 2600 programmers worked and lived
There is a huge difference between saving all of Rembrandt's stuff than it is some 22 year old college drop out programmer who created a video game in the hey days of long forgotten startup company. And yeah, there have been numerous documentaries, and articles written about Atari in those early days. Who would want to save a dilapidated roller rink under the auspices that a great and noble video game company used it as their HQ for a few years??
But then this roller rink down the block became available: 10,000 square feet! I mean, we were just jam-packed, and we had people on roller skates actually running around on the roller-skate rink building Pongs.
While I do think leaving certain things to the sands of time is a good thing, vacuuming up everything is just as worrisome. Are we going to be hoarders of a bygone technological past where a large majority of the "stuff" we save will have little, if any use to anybody anymore??
Having a background in anthropology, I find it fascinating there will be many generations of kids who leave no physical trace of their existence since a large majority will be in electronic form. Just imagine how people's lives are in a sort of suspended animation after passing away and having their Facebook pages live on forever.
I would say there are several classifications of things worth saving through a broad net:
- kindling sources, like a LiveJournal post that inspired Lin Manuel to write Hamilton (for a fake example)
- early work of a future star, like imagine Lorde posted early songs to MySpace. This is already a clear issue as many posted songs have been deleted or lost for various reasons.
- valuable things on shaky ground. Yahoo Groups, for the latest example. But I just saw on Reddit someone was looking for a deleted scene from Blair Witch Project that was supposedly the first video ever published on Amazon Prime Video... and now it has nearly vanished. That seems crazy to me from so many directions.
- the value of the ephemeral. Gold and jewelry from old civilizations is nice but we know so much of how people actually lived by examining their garbage, scrap notes, broken bowls, etc.
- the myth of permanence. We feel like 10 million people see a video, it is probably preserved. But there are no master tapes of any of this and so much of everything is interlinked and hard to piece together after the fact. What were people's tech stack when they were making MySpace? How big were people's hard drives? Did rhey share sonngs theough Kazaa or play them on MySpace directly? What was the state of Javascript then, what were the security issues or underground trends? How did songs propogate, where were they shared? Were people sending links in email or AIM, were people sharing links on Digg? This is stuff from like a decade or two and already you need to think like an archaeologist to have any sense of how the culture really existed because there were so many moving parts from year to year.
- the value of datasets. Imagine putting some thought against the Geocities archive to see how HTML blink tags grew then fell in popularity over time. Or how a meme propagated, or analyze the link structure between groups of people or by topic or any make any number of interesting inquiries about how humans operate culturally in digital space and how interact socially through certain set of tools and limitations. There are very interesting possibilities here for understanding ourselves better as a species.
Playing devils advocate here for a moment. . .
Considering we as humans learn little from our past, keeping all of this knowledge is a benefit to whom then? Some people who feel nostalgic about Sony's first walkman? Or maybe people using it for nefarious reasons? If humans continue to make the same historical mistakes over and over, what benefit does the human race gain from cataloging all this information? I would venture to guess, its more plausible it will be used against us instead of furthering our own culture.
>> We know more about how Rembrandt painted and lived than we do about how Atari 2600 programmers worked and lived
There is a huge difference between saving all of Rembrandt's stuff than it is some 22 year old college drop out programmer who created a video game in the hey days of long forgotten startup company. And yeah, there have been numerous documentaries, and articles written about Atari in those early days. Who would want to save a dilapidated roller rink under the auspices that a great and noble video game company used it as their HQ for a few years??
https://www.polygon.com/2018/7/6/17542154/atari-book-valley-...
But then this roller rink down the block became available: 10,000 square feet! I mean, we were just jam-packed, and we had people on roller skates actually running around on the roller-skate rink building Pongs.
While I do think leaving certain things to the sands of time is a good thing, vacuuming up everything is just as worrisome. Are we going to be hoarders of a bygone technological past where a large majority of the "stuff" we save will have little, if any use to anybody anymore??
Having a background in anthropology, I find it fascinating there will be many generations of kids who leave no physical trace of their existence since a large majority will be in electronic form. Just imagine how people's lives are in a sort of suspended animation after passing away and having their Facebook pages live on forever.
It's a bit hard to wrap your head around tbh.