Data loss: digital dark ages


A few days ago i was taking a look at WindowMaker[1] themes (the
NeXTSTEP like windows manager). Usually searching for images gives
you a faster feedback on the results you want, and there they were,
all the themes that FreshMeat[2] used to have.
Freshmeat was the place to get news on FLOSS, Linux, UNIXes, libre
culture, everything.
Its search features were fantastic. Narrow down results by language,
platform, license type, everything really. Projects had reviews,
discussions, emacs vs vim flamefests (a initiation ritual almost as
old as UNIX itself) and themes to beautify your favourite window
manager (or desktops), mostly from themes.org[3].
Themes.org was acquired and became part of freshmeat.
Suddenly out of the blue, without warning, the entire themes section
disappeared from the website. All those crazy, preposterous and
kitsch WM, blackbox themes, GkrellM and XMMS skins with the
obligatory Matrix backgrounds, vanished. Perhaps that was the reason.
Back in the 90s everyone had a screenshot of Matrix as a desktop
background, probably to the dismay of movie studios in their
limitless short-sightedness.
You can still find the images in archive.org but the archive itself
hosts only a superficial layer of history.

So, why would someone miss 4:3 aspect ratios SVGA themes for
old-style (and lightweight) windows managers? The world moved on,
and in most aspects it took several steps backwards.
There's a vast piece of internet history, of cultural history even,
that vanished and isn't stored anywhere.
That alone is a loss. But it's not just the endless bits of
information and culture that were at some point available and just
vanished from the internet. There's a considerable amount of closed
proprietary software that also vanished.
There's no safe copy of the source code in a government library, a
central repository that would try and balance the copyrights with
the need to preserve cultural artefacts. Is software a cultural
artefact? Data on public networks?
Our over-infatuation with immediate gratification and fast
consumption is slowly but inexorably paving the way for a digital
dark age.

But from bits into something more personal.

At some point in life we need to go through the possessions of those
that departed. Organize things. A bitter-sweet experience, more
bitter than sweet, but necessary.
Suddenly finding photos, yellowed black and white photos. Colour
photos, some with reddish tones. You cannot stop thinking that in
spite of all the imperfections: the film grain of the black and
white emulsions, the chromogenic grain and reddish cast of unstable
colour dies in colour photos or slides, and the blurriness and low
resolving power of those lenses and film formats. That besides the
haptic quality of a real photo, there's something timeless there.
Precisely because it's imperfect perhaps. Perusing through items
you find some velvet clad booklet like cases, and inside,
tintypes[4] protected by velvet. The image is almost solarized[5].
You can only venture that the photos were taken in the XIX century
but you know nothing about the people in the images and those that
could tell you who they were are also long gone.
But you have the images, letters, possessions, books. You know that
family history is real, tangible.
What are we going to leave to our children and grandchildren?
Digital formats come and go. Although there are some standards,
some software companies are notorious for their brazen attempts to
subvert them and turn them into added-value proprietary offerings
with all that it entails.
Data on the networks is perhaps unsurprisingly fragile. Social
networks come and go. Hi5, MySpace, Facebook....
Were they to vanish suddenly, close their doors, i wouldn't shed a
tear. Civilization would be better for it without the frantic five
minutes of hate and newspeak Orwell predicted, though he couldn't
ever have imagined the medium. For the biggest part, it's a blessing
that most of this data will vanish.
Not everything is worth documenting.

Still the fact remains: a vast part of the population use these
networks and deposit their entire family history there, for better
or worse.
Leaving aside the implications of publishing your entire personal
and family life on the internet for all to see, you're not
guaranteed to have access to this data forever.
You can be suspended, censored by political correctness, banned
for having unpopular political opinions and so on, and loose
access to all that.
Even if you were to keep all that data in your platforms (mobile,
tablet, et cetera) it's highly unlikely these technologies would
still be functional after one hundred years. Bitrot, data loss,
storage corruption, planned obsolescence, and inevitable decay. Are
you sure someone will be able to access the photos in your mobile
one hundred or so years from now?

What are you leaving behind for your family? Will your great
grandchildren know your face? Or will they be browsing some archive
website in the hope of finding something, anything about you, only
to find the archives are superficial at least, or that copyrights
and intellectual property laws kept some information behind locked
doors forever or worse, discarded it?
That the image formats are not supported. The storage is corrupt,
behind repair?
Some of us might have a desk, box, closet, with our most private
family possessions. There's nothing for the future generations.
Nothing tangible, literally tangible.
Your family history is in the cloud.
Our culture is in the cloud.


Links on the world wide web:

[1] https://www.windowmaker.org/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freecode
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20000302210343/http://www.themes.org/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintype
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabattier_effect