On archiving

Haven't written in a few days. Well, at least not digitally. It has been doing more writing on paper. Mainly correspondences. Do people still write those? It sometimes feels that writing letters is a dying activity. There is no denying the power of receiving a hand-writ letter. There is a value added to the letter outside of just the writing. It takes time. There is an extra layer of effort required. This effort makes it more valuable than an email. Though both could function just as well in conveying messages. Writing emails takes away the element o personality that letters have. It makes it sterile. This is perfect for corporate writing and conducting business. Yet, it leaves a lot to be desired for anything personal. Furthermore, personal writing vanishes into the ether. How often do we go back into our digital annals? What is the likelihood that others would? Can you imagine if Vincent VanGogh had written to his brother Theo, via email? Where would his writings be now? Or what of the journal writings of young Anne Frank?

Thinking of personal writing in that context is sobering. Imagine the breadth of writing being done in digital walled-gardens. What would happen if those companies disappeared overnight. We've been conditioned to think "once it's on the internet, it's there forever". But that's only true in this abnormal period marked by growth. Abnormal, because it cannot be sustained. Even now, we've experienced catastrophic loss of data-centes. This illusion of permanence only exists because we ignore such events.

However, a lot of writing has already been lost to history. Houses burned, paper disintegrated, and books improperly stored. The writing that has persisted through history (and we read now) are exceptions. It is likely the same will repeat with us. Yet, do we not owe it to future historians to do better? Especially since, we "know better". Right?

This type of thinking feels good. But, if we look at books written hundreds of years ago, a pattern emerges. Many thinkers of that time felt similarly! And those are just the opinions of those that survived. Surely, there must have been others. Their works did not survive.

What, then, is the solution for this? Is it as simple as keeping multiple formats of records? Perhaps it is redundant storage of data in multiple centers. Back it up in a usb, an online storage, and one with a trusted contact? But what if we lose the ability to access these storage methods. What then? Should we keep a printed record of it all? That doesn't sound like it would be possible. Perhaps this could be done for a minority of personal writings. But it doesn't scale at all. Imagine the sheer amount of paper that would be required at scale.

Now, what if instead of archiving personal writing we included knowledge as well. We would need entire cities dedicated to the maintenance and storage of records. Is there even enough paper in the world to print out and collect all this? It doesn't seem sustainable. Certainly doesn't seem feasable. Who would buy into such an idea? We don't even have the collective agreement in dealing with issues that affect us now (e.g climate change). It is unfathomable to find collective agreement for knowledge archives for the future.

Maybe we can write it in tiny tiny scripts. Ok, so we've recreated microfilm. Now our archiving capacity has grown. But we need to make sure the technology to read microfilm persists. But thankfully that's just magnification. This may work. We can write really small and leave tablets of instructions. These tablets would be made of fire-resistant material. However if we try to retain knowledge this way, we run into problems too. Say we want to remember computer programs that we deem essential. These could be billions of lines of code (include libraries and compilers). There is a limit to how small you can write thigns in microfilm. If we try to take it too far from microfilm, problems arise again. The further we push this storage decision, the more advanced the technology required to retrieve information.

Perhaps we can do an incremental storage growth. We create something that writes at an atomic level. And it contains all these essential theorems, programs, and proofs. But to access this "atomic-film", you need to unlock the knowlege in microfilm. And to get to microfilm, you must unlock the basic knolwedge left in the tablets. Of course, now we have multiple points of failure. Lose the tablets, and you lose access to the microfilm. Would you even know what they were? What if you lose the microfilms, and only had the tablets and atomic films.

I don't know the answer to this. Perhaps in the case of civilization collapse, it really will…collapse. There's no fool-proof solution to archiving knowledge. But it is fun to think about.