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."
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"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."
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"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."
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The preservation of human knowledge helps rebuild a civilization after a collapse.
Would the Renaissance have happened without monastic libraries like Monte Cassino?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Irish_Saved_Civilization
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Irish_Saved_Civilization
Or Arab translations & palimpsest of classical Greek texts?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_contributions_to_the_Islamic_world
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeco-Arabic_translation_movement
https://blackhistorystudies.com/resources/resources/15-facts-on-the-moors-in-spain/
In Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale the story is revealed as a cache of cassette recordings about her life under the regime.
Future academics in the novel study the tapes as historical artifacts because fascists & theocrats do a very good job scrubbing history of their crimes.
Erasure of women, LGBTQ, & non-Christians from history is nothing new.
Something as simple as a DVD or CD can save cultural artifacts.
Molly White
Nicole Parsons
@pineywoozle ‘s #3WordNote