Incredible essay about the importance and challenges of digital archival by Maxwell Neely-Cohen, as well as the various imperfect strategies to achieve “century-scale” digital archives.
https://lil.law.harvard.edu/century-scale-storage/
"We picked a century scale because most physical objects can survive 100 years in good care. It is attainable, and yet we selected it because the design of mainstream digital storage mediums are nowhere close to even considering this mark."
1/
"The current web pages and marketing for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud do not mention cultural or historical preservation at any point. ... At this precise moment all of these services mention AI (a lot) and how it’s going to change everything. ... Two years ago their marketing materials mentioned web3 and the metaverse (a lot) and how it was going to change everything, and how if your business did not adapt you were going to be left behind—yet those sentiments no longer appear."
2/
"The Jack Welch school of shareholder supremacy is completely incompatible with the sorts of values that would ensure a cloud storage provider would reliably exist for a century."
3/
"The progeny of [early internet filesharing] platforms still exist, and in some cases, thrive, though they are no longer a dominant means of distributing media. Sci-Hub, Library Genesis, and Z-Library offer academic journal articles for free to anyone who wants to download them, flouting intellectual property laws and invoking the right to science and culture under Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights." 4/
"It’s worth considering the efficacy of piracy and the intentional breaking of intellectual property law as a long-term preservation tactic. Abigail De Kosnik, a professor in the Berkeley Center for New Media, contends that, given the nature of digital cultural output and the failures of the current corporate and institutional orders to properly care for them, ..." 5/
"... piracy-based media preservation efforts are more likely to survive catastrophic future events than traditional institutions. On the other hand, as the notorious prosecution of Aaron Swartz or the legal cases against the Internet Archive demonstrate, engaging in copyright infringement at scale runs the constant risk of sanction and shutdown from state actors." 6/
On blockchain-based filestorage projects:
"If providing storage generates revenue, that revenue will centralize because it is incentivized to centralize, just like other supposedly decentralized offerings in an unregulated market context. The untested legal status of these systems also poses potential problems. ..." 7/
"... None of these schemes have so far proven that they can function, let alone thrive, as functional viable marketplaces for a sustained period of time, nor that they can reliably incentivize storage in times of strife or scarcity. ... To directly peg an archival storage method to a market system with stakeholders that feed on volatility is equivalent to burying your hard drives in a 100-year flood zone." 8/
"If your goal in century-scale storage is avoiding kinetic, Hollywood-ready catastrophes, then decentralized solutions are ideal, but whether they can combat neglect is less clear. If a decentralized scheme wants to be successful at century scale, this is what they should and must attack. One of the few clear benefits of centralization is that it inspires care. If people know something is important, of value, potentially even the last of something, they tend to fight every day to protect it." 9/
"What is consistent about these examples is that they all involve groups who care. The most enduring decentralized efforts don’t owe their success to technological or organizational innovation, but rather by having enlisted generations of people with an emotional and intellectual investment in their worth. For both cloud storage services and distributed storage schemes, the question is whether they can provoke the necessary level of passion and watchfulness." 10/
"Are they and their technologies empowering those who care, or setting them up to fail? Can cloud storage corporations transform themselves into wardens? Can distributed storage systems turn each node into a guardian?" 11/
"The librarians and archivists of the world have been tackling the challenges of digital preservation for decades—the issue is that no one else is. The real solution to century-scale storage, especially at scale, is to change this reality. Successful century-scale storage will require a massive investment in digital preservation, a societal commitment. Politicians, governments, companies, and investors will have to be convinced, incentivized, or even bullied." 12/
#CULTURE preservation might be something we individually keep alive best more than BigTech (and all that comes with that)... Metaphors of "too good to be true" and "burning the candles at both ends"...
https://hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff/113635494812376215
@molly0xfff #CULTURE preservation might be something we individually keep alive best more than BigTech (and all that comes with that so heavily)...
Picture shows metaphors that come to mind, like "burning the candles at both ends" to shine so brightly for us, and "too good to be true" about how this all started... and helped us rob energy from the present and future.
Said with kindness.
On the candle is written #Google, #Amazon #AWS (storage) #JeffBezos, #Gates
Unfortunately ALL of this apart from maybe text simply takes too many bites and chunks from the planet (#Tech is #burning up our #future and our culture while #preserving it).
I admit I want for a lot but prefer now the #2000s where even then the #metal for #tower and #base #units are like 'wow where'd all this metal come from? There are tons of it even in this one machine' (and imagine how many tower units and just the metal exist for this let alone #electronics and more types of absolutely every little thing until it's just not doable for #planet / #waste / #climate )
