Searching for Tuva: Before the internet and now | Hacker News Reader

Searching for Tuva: Before the internet and now

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32 pointsIN4RA3D10 comments

I think in the future, they'll reset the calendar with what is now 2000 being year zero. Because everything that happened after that ended up with an indexed web page, and thus is searchable. They'll call pre-2000 the pre-digital era and it'll be sort of like the line between Old English and modern English. I guess eventually we'll digitize everything that's ever been printed, but still.

Sadly, in the past I remember clearly thinking that, someday, when smart phones and high speed networks are ubiquitous and literally everyone has access to all the world's information at a touch of a button, the world would be a better place due to the increased knowledge of the average person. Democracy, I thought, could only prosper in the light of such egalitarian access to information. How wrong I was...

I share the sentiments of some that believe in our current ephemeral web and damageable media, we're in a dark age that is worse than before the 90s. No one is keeping anything in a permanent way yet.

I mostly do not share these sentiments.

Before the late 1800s, few things were recorded in any way. How did Jenny Lind, "the Swedish Nightingale", sound? What did Marie Taglioni's en pointe style look like? What of all the lost films from early Hollywood, stored on flammable nitrocellulose?

What would it mean to keep petabytes of data "in a permanent way" which would assuage your concerns?

You're nuts if you think anything on the Internet today will survive 300 years.

To make things even more interesting, because of the overly long copyright, everyone's clinging on to anything they can. As a result a lot of stuff is buried and most likely destroyed by the passage of time (how many CDs have you had that can't be read anymore?). Say what you will about piracy, but it can surface interesting things people and companies are hoarding in the undefined hope that sometime in the future they will become valuable again.

Examples:

* source code and assets of games made in the 70's, 80's and 90's: very often you can see even the companies that made these games unable to re-build these games, because they lost the source code (!)

* documentaries from many broadcast networks

Many works are left to rot on fragile film reels.

"something given has no value". The author is going out of his way to make his acquisition of information harder so that he might value it more than the same information that just lands in his lap. Some distinguish data from information from knowledge from wisdom. Slowing down and forcing oneself to absorb better - to think and reflect on human scales - is noble, but perhaps the problem is we need differently shaped brains to deal with this firehose of information. Attention span suffers at this level, no time to synthesize what we just absorbed.

I 'found my Tuva' last year, a broad and intriguing topic hiding in the middle-half of the 19th century. And I thought I'd wind up having to go to physical libraries to get answers to many questions.

No, as it turned out; thanks to the copyright-free status of all the excellent, digitized books from that era (and the following 50 years of comments ... also copyright-free). Within a month I had amassed over 2GB of maps, PDFs of original sources (many from Archive.org), and more than enough quality, modern commentary.

It was and remains an absorbing adventure tale ... set in an earlier era ... and I never had to leave this desk.

"Great Soviet Encyclopedia" was translated and published into English. These books contain a very detailed information about "Tuvinian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic". Finding information before Internet was difficult but not impossible.

Even if there were no internet you could just buy a plane ticket SFO-KYZ and in 30 hours you are standing in Kyzyl after a few transfers and a $2000 setback for round-trip. This is thanks to USSR cracking and revealing tasty pulp. You will still need to get a visa, and consulate in SF is now closed.

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