this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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It's much worse than this. Digital media is not durable in any archivally/archaeologically relevant sense of the word. Magnetic tape in a bunker, maybe, but that'll leave exoarchaeologists with mainly data about finance. Spinning rust in a data center (where most of "the internet" is) has an operational lifespan measured in single-digit years, and SSDs not substantially better. Any actual data that survives a disaster will almost certainly be unreadable without an electron microscope since all the related tech will be long gone.
Anything digital has the hard-copy shelf life of a can of tuna and our paper is acidic pulp that crumbles to dust in a few decades. How many primary documents are we carving into stone or stamping in ceramic these days?
We'll be like the carthaginians or the etruscans and will leave barely anything legible behind
has paper gotten significantly worse or something? books are one of the few things that seem to have a lifespan well beyond what capitalists and consumers would consider their utility
It really depends on the paper. Like you can get "archival" paper that has low lignen levels and won't yellow and deteriorate as fast. At the other end you have like newsprint and cheap paperbacks (the pulp in pulp fiction refers to the low quality of the paper in the books) and they really don't last. In general though, I think most of the old texts we have as books are written on parchment, which is leather. I do think there are ways to preserve paper, but it probably involves periodic maintenance and replacement and specific conditions.
Yeah only the modern paper that advertises itself as archival can last as long as a normal sheet of paper could a few hundred years ago. Also the parchment thing. And papyrus.
That's assuming the NSA isn't converting snapshots of the entire internet to tape and storing it in underground bunkers
i don't think we could produce enough tape for even a fraction of a snapshot. on top of that, there's too much data to even start sorting through what's worth saving and what's just junk
it makes sense to me that they just store absolutely everything always with the idea that at some point they'll be able to go back and efficiently sort through and decrypt it all
Our culture is now fully ephemeral...![emoji kiryu-pain kiryu-pain](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/d11567a6-de9f-4c76-b5c1-dc9ba97979c0.gif)