Let the Platforms Burn (doctorow.medium.com)

submitted 1 year ago by JRepin@lemmy.ml to c/technology@beehaw.org

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[-] Zeus@lemm.ee 38 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

when they burned the library of Alexandria the crowd cheered in horrible joy. They understood that there was something older than wisdom, and it was fire, and something truer than words, and it was ashes

- @yurirando, 2022

i understand the schadenfreude of watching these awful companies collapse, i really do. i experience it as well. but i can't help but baulk at how much data is being lost. assuming 99% of it is worthless, that's still millions of ideas that are lost forever.

a few years ago there were (albeit obviously wrong at the time, but nevertheless) questions about "is this the last generation of archæology? all info is now stored forever on the internet" - and now, countless links go to a facebook page i need to log in to see, or a tweet that's unreachable because twitter's ddos'ed itself. years of tech support on reddit, and anonymously uploaded art on imgur. the work web.archive.org and archive.is are doing is invaluable, but it will never be enough.

i want to watch the corporations burn too. but we're losing something we'll never get back.

[-] luciole@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

Typical digital media is ridiculously short lived compared to everything else humanity has used to store information so far. Five years? Ten? Conserving any digital data is this act of juggling where if you drop the ball it's gone; you're constantly replicating and updating. We see the "cloud" as some bulletproof storage but long term it's up in the air really.