Internet Impermanence

Mar 26, 2009 at 6:45 PM
4 comments

In one thousand years, how will we be studied? How will the future even know we were here when our cheaply-constructed buildings will long be dust and our intellectual property scattered ones and zeroes in the wind?

A bit dramatic, yes, but it's not the first time the thought's been made. I've printed only a handful of the thousands of pictures I've taken over the years, most of them going onto my hard drive, to be looked at on cold, rainy days like this one. The box of prints I have in my closet is from college, when developing and printing them was the only way to admire them. Now, my idea of permanence is uploading them to flickr. Even if my computers crash and my back-ups fail, they'll be there. Right?

Then I read this:

We regret to inform you that we are forced to indefinitely suspend the FileFront site operations on March 30, 2009. If you have uploaded files, images or posted blogs, or if you would like to download some of your favorite files, please take this opportunity to download them before March 30th when the site will be suspended. [src]

FileFront, a popular site specializing in gaming videos, is going the way of the dodo. This epitomizes the contradiction that is internet permanence: the data is always there, ready for Google to index it and people to search for it. Only in the end, it's just data.

FileFront is a casualty that will be felt by some but not by most. But imagine a site like flickr disappearing from the interwaves. So much archived and shared creativity gone. Even bigger, what about YouTube? Even the mighty Google will one day be spoken of in the past tense. It's the whole, "On a long enough timeline..." thing.

Time to start printing my photos and burning DVDs of my movies? Maybe. Who knows?

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I've probably told this story before, but...

My uncle works at NASA. He was called in by some high ups once to consult on what to do with all our satellite photos. The old tapes they were stored on were starting to rust, and they wanted an opinion on how to back things up for longevity. His actual response, "we know if you carve them on stone or draw them on parchment and lock them in a pyramid in a dry climate that they'll last for a few thousand years. Everything else is just conjecture."

We know photographs are sustainable for over a hundred years. We simply don't know how long DVDs will last. Film is likely much longer-lived and doesn't need software to be viewed, just an old projector, which are much more reliable than old computers.Digitally: keep them in an open format and don't have a fire.

For some strange reason this post and your last one didn't show up in my neighborhood section. In fact when I look at my vox friends list it seems to be under the impression that you haven't updated since January 28th. Very odd.

This is something I've thought about a few times. I'm not really sure what the solution is, other than lots and lots of back ups, and redundancy in where our data goes. That and maybe some sort of large scale effort to back up large portions of the internet redundantly, maybe through the Library of Congress? That'd probably require a lot of funding we may or may not have...

To add to the NASA story, NASA was actually losing data faster than it could archive it. Perhaps newer technology has remedied that.

Also, we no longer know how to get to the moon -- the Apollo missions were so quickly torn down that no one thought to collect all the relevant records from the various subcontractors. Many of those subcontractors have since gone away. There's actually a good business in old Apollo relics as they are the only 'record' of how some things were done.

This is to say that the Internet didn't create impermanence, but it certainly accelerated it. Microsoft flushed my hotmail account because I didn't login for 30 days, which is apparently their time scale of permanence. Years of e-mail, whoosh! New versions of Web sites erase old ones and the Wayback Machine only comes to the rescue on occassion. There's so many graphics I know I created in high school that I can no longer find -- it's so much easier to misplace that floppy disc during a move than a file cabinet, yet they hold the same.

My strategy is to file the bits in as many buckets as possible -- Flickr, Amazon S3, DVDs, hard disks. Hopefully some survive when disaster strikes.