Think of the privilege you had when you were younger. You could do something stupid and nobody could whip out a high def camera to record it and make it part of your history forever.
Let it rot.
For example I have recordings of the Colbert report going back to ~2005. Some of his skits released during that time would be classified as "hate speech" in 2019. Of course he, and mainstream broadcasting companies would love it if you didn't think about that. There are plenty of news clips and interviews where mainstream politicians (on Left AND Right) casually dismiss gay marriage. Powerful tech influencers like Mark Zuckerberg would love it if his IMs would disappear from the Internet. The examples go on and on.
At this point, I'm not really comfortable with what we're preserving.
Our history is an inseparable part of who we are, and it should not be forgotten.
That being said, there's a lot of valuable information on the internet that is absolutely worth preserving. Scrape off the layer of social media and the internet is still a place of learning and problem solving. I do my own repairs on my car and the amount of times I've found a well written photo essay on a particular fix in a random honda forum, only to find the linked pictures broken, is astounding and a shame to say the least.
Kind of like saying “People who go to prison just shouldn’t commit crimes.” I don’t believe in making a case equivalence here.
Being publicly prosecuted has just as much to do with “who” you are as “what” you did. I’m personally not fine with this distinction.
One segment from the final episode featured on HN a few weeks ago. It references the burning of witches, in Scotland, from earlier in the same episode. Burke's point was that a set of beliefs which had once carried legal force no longer does. That route can run in reverse, and it's quite possible for beliefs, or actions, previously legally sanctioned (or at least not criminalised) to become otherwise. Prohibitions against ex post facto laws limit this in many jurisdictions, but changes in social mores are less forgiving. I've lived long enough to see some remarkable changes along several such lines, and have witnessed social and political upheavals elsewhere that are even more pronounced.
There's the question of whether or not it's the fact of a durable record, or the abuse of power through that record, that is the real root of the problem. As Aesop noted, any excuse will do for a tyrant. But the persistent record does seem to pose certain problems. Particularly against a shifting set of judgements.
Things like HP Lovecraft renouncing racism is only preserved because he wrote so many damn letters. It doesn't make the racist stuff he wrote less racist, but it allows a really clear view on how worldviews could change at the time. Perhaps the things we are storing will have historic or philosophical value.
I miss real privacy though.
Yeah, I'm going to need some proof for that. Eddie Murphy's '80s HBO standup routines are available in full on YouTube, and some of that material is absurdly homophobic. He isn't a pariah by any means.
People do see nuance and understand that values and mores change over time, and what might have been socially acceptable at one point, is no longer so.
> GLAAD: Kevin Hart ‘Shouldn’t Have Stepped Down’ as Oscars Host, but Used Gig to Bring Unity
https://www.indiewire.com/2018/12/glaad-kevin-hart-oscars-ho...
If it's just going to be used as witchhunt fodder however than you can fuck right off with that.
Sanity check for 2019:
* "hate speech" should be a link
* when I click it, it should accordion out into links to recordings of Colbert Report that you classified as "hate speech" queued up to the relevant skits
* when I click one it should start streaming the data from all the peers who care about preserving old Colbert Report videos
* Copyright law should have changed a decade ago to protect people who rebroadcasting exact copies of data that the copyright owner/licensee initially publicly broadcast (where "exact" is verified by checking hashes)
Some reddit users are egregious about it, installing scripts that overwrite their comments after x amount of time, seemingly oblivious to the fact that every edit on reddit can be found through archival tools. The solution is to take better care to not conflate your anonymous online persona to your real life persona—just don't post identifying information publicly online and you will be head and shoulders above many users on the internet in terms of privacy. There's no need to purge the internet of it's collective knowledge and history.
We are very lucky to have the wayback machine preserving this stuff from dissapearing into the void, but it doesn't cache everything on the internet, especially if that forum I visited had shut down and became impossible to find in a search result.
Side note: Is there an extension or bookmarklet available to automatically pull a web archive?
Correct, useful, or noteworthy information is often re-posted and copied, leading to preservation.
There is value in archiving things beyond just relying on the small % of things that get actively reposted elsewhere. A good local caching solution of everything you've viewed on the web would be extremely useful for your personal reference, especially when sites frequently close and links die.
If you really wanted to fantasize you could seed your cached site data using bittorrent to maintain a common web archive with everyone on the internet, free from a reliance of one lumbering archival corporate entity that might disappear on the whim of a VC or shareholder, free from commercial profiteering practices, free from the ad men and anyone else who's job it is to pollute and dilute technology for profit, and firmly in the hands of the users of the internet.
> Think of the privilege you had when you were younger. You could do something stupid and nobody could whip out a high def camera to record it and make it part of your history forever.
This is an excellent point, and I agree 100%. But it's not a priori obvious that we need to embrace internet rot to solve this problem. Perhaps we can work towards a future where privacy rights and digital literacy protect individuals from offense archaeology, and at the same time, work to preserve the knowledge, ideas, and sheer human weirdness that get posted every day (as long as the creators don't want it removed. My understanding is that the Internet Archive has explicitly stated that they are not interested in preserving stuff where there has been a takedown request.)
One might argue that we have to make a choice. This is touched on in the article - redundancy presents a tradeoff between persistence benefits and security/privacy risks. But we should examine this tradeoff more closely and see if there isn't a healthy middle ground before we ask for one side wholesale.
As the article points out, a more concerning issue is that “universities, governments and scientific societies are struggling to preserve scientific data”.
Such is life?
So let's think about what we can do for the generation that is about to be born.