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Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if by moving to digital communications we won't paradoxically be leaving a black hole for future historians when it comes to such records.

I.e. now what would previously have been letters from the front might be sent as a text, phone call or E-Mail. Dead people don't pay for advertising revenue, so that data's likely being deleted soon after they're gone, or when their phone dies.

Yes some of these services allow salvaging the data of relatives, but most people aren't going to be paying whatever's the future Google extra money monthly to preserve grandma's multi-gigabyte E-Mail account. What would previously be letters from the front stored in a box somewhere will be stored alongside swaths of commercial E-Mail and spam.

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It probably does so more than is immediately obvious. If you look at a letter or postcard or journal, there's a physically atomic and generally sufficient representation of the content. They contain the who/what/when/where/why of the story and, if discovered in the future generally persist in a complete state.

With digital communications, this is generally not going to be the case. If someone unearths an Amazon datacenter and starts poring over the content stored in flash drives, they are going to just find volumes and volumes of raided/sharded/indexed/normalized/encrypted content that mixes presentation with prose and reads like someone quickly twisting the dial on an old analog radio.

Most of the content we see now is emergent from the system that stewards it and is only accessible when it's in operation.

> "If someone unearths an Amazon datacenter and starts poring over the content stored in flash drives, they are going to just find volumes and volumes of raided/sharded/indexed/normalized/encrypted content that mixes presentation with prose and reads like someone quickly twisting the dial on an old analog radio."

+1 for the terrific analogy!

> I.e. now what would previously have been letters from the front might be sent as a text, phone call or E-Mail.

There are hundreds of email archivists working at universities across the country. The reason you don't hear about them is that email didn't exist until ~1971, universities don't accession email collections until either after someone dies or at least until relatively late in their career, and once collections are accessioned they are usually embargoed for some amount of time -- e.g. IIRC 50 years in the case of Harvard.

Also, even though there are 15 or so different email archival software packages, none of them is really fully baked yet, so right now lots of universities are just putting email into longterm storage formats and then they're content to just wait another 10+ years until the email archival software is in a better state before processing them for publication.

If you have good email threads you want to publish on the Internet now though, you can use our tool https://www.fwdeveryone.com.

E-Mails are fairly easy to archive. What about Whatsapp, Slack, etc? Shared Google documents? You need to create archivers for each of these apps, or at least the apps where the "important" communication is happening over.

That is one of the key reasons not to use the chat-like apps. Hard to search, hard to back up, hard to thread...

This. Every time you send a message in one of those apps, it's like taking a $20 bill and lighting it on fire.

I'll admit they have their uses, and hopefully they'll get better over time. But given their current state, if you don't place any value on what you're saying then why even say it in the first place?

I owe my current career to those apps. I’m mostly remote and I’ve been able to stay in tune with the pulse at the big offices via chat apps. Every time I send a message through one of those apps, it’s like putting a $20 bill in my pocket.

chat apps aren't a replacement for email, they're a replacement for in-person face-to-face talking.

You can't search or even store voice conversations (unless you explicitly record them, so by your logic, why would you talk to people at all?

That's only an illusion because the most popular ones are complete trash.

Telegram has your whole chat history (or most of it) indexed and you can search it very quickly from the main window (just press Ctrl+F and type away).

The history can also be exported, along with images and other files, to JSON, or to a bunch of HTML files.

> E-Mails are fairly easy to archive.

I mean unless you think the value of the knowledge contained within email is obviously less than the value that will be unlocked by self-driving cars, it stands to reason that solving the problem may not actually be any less complicated.

On the other hand, we are by accident storing vastly more communication than we use to. Many letters I would not have saved, and conversations that would never have even have been recorded are now by default. All it takes is someone finding a copy of them 100 (or 1000) years from now.

Most copies, like most old books and most letters, will be destroyed. But some copies of some peoples information will probably live on. Some hard drives and flash memory will be miraculously preserved or whatever for future generations automated electron scanning microscopes to decode.

I have some letters my grandfather wrote to his mother when he was a young man:

http://www.walterbright.com/trip/chas.html

But the letters my grandmother wrote to him are totally lost.

You want privacy. That's privacy.

Historians' heroes will be those with publicly facing personas. No one will remember anyone except the guy with a public Twitter profile.

They are busy chatting about airstrikes on WhatsApp these days so I am guessing email is passe - https://www.wired.com/story/the-first-smartphone-war/

It's becoming expected that communication between two people or groups of people be fully private and encrypted, which was never the norm in the past. Not having random historical records is a side-effect of that, and IMO will only get worse.

In the past, people didn't share as much and as often so it didn't matter that their communications weren't encrypted. These days, the average person probably sends hundreds or thousands of messages per day across social media and instant messaging apps.

I keep old phones, laptops, and hard drives in a box for that reason. Eventually a robot may find it in the rubble and wave their magnetic proboscis over it and include things they find in their vlog.

What is the value?

Honestly I view all of this (digging into someone's personal correspondence from the past) as extremely overly voyeuristic, rather than having actual value.

If it wasn't meant to be public originally, I don't want it to be public. It does not respect the original author's intention.

(Not trying to be hostile - but I just wanted to say this.)

It's a good question. The reason we know how devastating and inhumane wars like say the Eastern front in WWII is in no small due to these sorts of records, otherwise we'd mostly just have contemporary state propaganda, statistics and the like.

Reading about what a meat grinder war is for the grunt on the ground helps future generations a lot more in not repeating those mistakes than so-and-so many millions died.

I think past a given point we shouldn't respect the author's privacy. Everybody's got records they'd like to keep private, and perhaps they'd even like to keep it private past their death to avoid some harm among their surviving immediate relatives.

But past a certain point everyone who could be harmed by such disclosures is long dead.

Living people are harmed by such disclosures if the idea that this might happen to their communications in the future makes them less willing to communicate openly and honestly with their loved ones.

Does the idea of a future historian poring over your e-mails make you less willing to send those e-mails today?

No, but I don't think this will happen and I don't send emails that I'm particularly concerned about others reading.

WWII letters were used as an example here. My grandfather was alive during WWII. I think it's reasonable to expect that there are people sending emails they'd much rather not have their grandchildren learn about after their death.

The question isn't whether or not they'd prefer it when they were alive, it's whether we should care now that they're dead.

I'm willing to bet you agree with this notion in principle, and would just like to quibble about the time scale. Or do you think that if we unearthed something that's clearly private correspondence on a clay tablet from ancient Sumer that it should be kept private?

In this specific case, I'm willing to bet that if someone were to say "this secret should be kept from my grandchildren after I'm dead" it's exactly the sort of thing their living grandchildren would have an interest in knowing about, and that interest should outweigh a dead person's privacy.

If we don't respect dead peoples' privacy, then living people won't expect their privacy to be respected when they die. This can cause people distress and result in changed behavior, which are real negative outcomes on living people. Currently living people care about their legacies and don't want embarrassing communications to become public after their deaths.

If you're really not concerned about the privacy of the dead and think that time scale is just a quibble, would you be ok with a policy that nude photos and 3d models of all dead bodies, together with personal identifying information, be uploaded to a public searchable website as soon as possible after death? After all, some people might be interested in seeing that.

Not many people are upset about the privacy implications of reading an ancient clay tablet, so this is not as big a concern. The time scale thing isn't just a quibble, it's central to how living people are affected.

Good point - and very potent. Thank you for your thoughts.

> If it wasn't meant to be public originally, I don't want it to be public. It does not respect the original author's intention.

People die. Humanity lives on. At some point, the author dies, then their relatives die, and when they're all dead twice over, this stuff becomes relevant as a way for the future generations to have a glimpse at the realities of life of their ancestors.

I.e. history. If we were to respect what you wrote, we wouldn't have history.

I don't think this directly addresses your question, but I do have a thought I just wanted to share. And from a super rough skim of the article, the writer seems to be motivated by his and family members' own experiences, not to make a comment on the amount of overreach, if any, they call for in the means to achieve the ends.

But, if one seeks a consensual compilation by one person, here is a superb one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17032891

I only bust it out on a super chill, lazy day off and read but a few letters at a time, and I'm still only a fraction of the way through it.

Voyeuristic? Probably. I find it a very rare, direct, and valuable transmission of an external being's perspective and senses, though. Candid but consensual.

This is why I've taken up a fountain pen, stamps, matches, and sealing wax.

Fountain pen lets me write longer without pressuring my hand. Stamps for actually changing the world, as opposed to private writings. Matches and sealing wax for constructive pyromania.

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