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Many people do this weird thing where they will overextend object permanence to the digital realm: what
was here yesterday is here today, and so it’ll be here tomorrow as well. This is a disastrous
perspective to take on data. Websites (those blue links you see scammers comment on your TikTok post)
die all the time for various reasons. One of the roughest losses in my memory was when yahoo killed
geocities so they could dedicate that server space to more boomer political news or something. Whatever.
The point is that all of that data was on the Internet, and it was not; for yahoo had taken it. A lot of
organizations, most notably ArchiveTeam, spent a lot of time and effort to backup geocities, but if it
was a smaller site it likely would have been snuffed and everyone would be none the wiser.
Remember those blue links from scammers I mentioned before? They’re not for long. But things that
actually matter also aren’t made to last. A ton of prehistoric pages on random
school.edu/~90yearoldprofessor directories have really cool information and are like a time-capsule from
when the PDP-11 was all-the-rage. A great essay that goes into detail better than I could is here
(https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/). Self-rolled webpages a-la math professors are great because
it makes sure you Keep It Simple, but one problem is that your crusty .html likely uses relative links,
and even if you still have the file you’re linking, if it gets moved it looks lost to the outside world.
A blossoming-flower-in-the-graveyard against this kind of link-rot is the Internet Archive and the
Wayback Machine, which is, for lack of a better term, really cool. That being said, I became less
enthused with the idea of IA when, in the first half of 2020, the governing body decided to remove the
limit on the number of copies of ebooks that could be “taken out” of its library at once. You can
probably tell by that clunky preceding sentence what my opinion on artificial scarcity of .epub files
is, but it doesn’t matter what I think. What matters is the very real possibility that the estate of
Tolkein or Salinger could have sued IA into the dirt and probably won – blowing up the spot of everyone
who depended on IA having copies of old, weird shit. Personally, I don’t think free ebooks for a few
months was worth that risk, and – I assume after the nastygrams from lawyers started coming in – IA
concurred and eventually walked back their decision.
I have a lot of respect for the IA team, and I have nothing against them as a group. They’ve made
something that, in the words of an XKCD comic: “ [is an] invaluable project which, if [it] didn’t exist,
we would dismiss as obviously ridiculous and unworkable.” They handle mind-boggling amounts of data and
present it in a way that is digestible for people browsing from a phone. They breathe new life into
ancient ROMs and outdated abandonware by having (potentially imperfect; see here) emulators for them –
right in the browser. Their approach to censorship is laudable given that they aim to be a repository of
digitized human thought (they’ve recently wobbled on this point, but I see that as burning the tree to
spare the forest – which shows a capacity to learn from their 2020 legal outing). Even with evidently
good people behind the wheel, the fact remains that IA is centralized and is precariously perched with
respect to copyright law, to say nothing of the fact that as the library expands, so too does their
bill. Eventually, someone at IA will have to make the excruciating decision as to whether a collection
of 1800s beeswax cylinder recordings is “more important” than the collected works of Terry A. Davis, and
will downsize accordingly. Personally, I hope they scrap the works of St. Terrance of Arizona, as I know
multiple people who have copies of his, er, productions.
So I’ll always be able to get my mitts on a copy of the Parable of the Bird Watching the Screen;
excellent. But what about people who don’t have my contacts? What about people who don’t know who Terry
was? There’s an old saying about someone’s second death occurring the last time someone speak their
name, and unfortunately that seems to extend to people with digital works too. I believe that data has
worth simply existing; the orthodox view is that data is made to be consumed, and if nobody cares enough
to consume it, they shouldn’t bother archiving it.