this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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Digital devices are fragile as fuck. And I'm not talking about dropping your phone and cracking your screen. I'm not even talking about solar storms (which are a real threat to mass digitization).
I'm talking about the fucking supply chain and politics. You thought the GPU shortage was bad with the pandemic? Just wait untill the US or China (or a rogue state) bombs silicon factories in Taiwan to deny access to that strategic ressource to the other. Just wait till a natural disaster takes out the majority of the highly concentrated chip manufacturing capability (taste of it with hard drive prices in 2011 flood in Thailand). Just wait until we all find out that one or more countries we are now at war with has installed hardware backdoors in all our devices (narrator: they already have) and destroying our electronic devices is now a matter of national defense and survival. Just wait until the next piece of legislation in your jurisdiction limits your access to information online. Suddenly all the data you were consulting from overseas is no longer available.
This truly 'paperless' society techists salivate over is one borne of extreme geopolitical stability which is a blip on the human existance, and is completely untested in the real world.
Heck you don't even have to use your imagination, just look at Russia currently. There are reports that they're importing household appliances to strip them of their microchips for use in military contexts.
Like you say, reliance on a highly globalized technological market is the result of historically anomalous geopolitical stability.
Digital is also shitty for long-term text storage, frankly. Data formats change constantly, software to read stuff changes constantly, disks go bad, the power goes out, and so on. The only thing that comes close to rivaling the durability/reliability of paper kept in a dry dark place and free of bookworms is clay tablets, and they're a real hassle to make and lug around. Archivists know that if you really need to preserve a text you print it on paper and store it appropriately.