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Comment by glofish | Hacker News Reader

There is an interesting conundrum here, when we post to the internet do we also consent to having that information saved for all eternity?

Archiving everything is still a novel and not fully understood concept it is not that clear that it is useful or beneficial over long term.

Forgetting can be a bliss.

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This is kind of an antithesis to his message in the post; that nothing is actually permanent, and while many people are concerned about continuity of service, ultimately perfect continuity is impossible, whether that's due to the organization running out of money, bad backup practices and a fire, global warming wiping Ashburn Virginia off the map, or the end of the human civilization by some other means.

I've helped with a couple risk registers at tech companies. Two things I've never seen appear in a risk register: The company runs out of money. Human society is wiped out. I've been laughed at once for bringing up variations on these. They're out of scope; risks stop being a threat when there's no one left to care about them.

I think the goal of keeping an internet-scale level of data accessible and searchable, for longer than one lifetime, is an impossible task. Maybe Archive.org/Archive.is can pull it off; I doubt it. Its an insane amount of data. Most of it is totally pointless, but its really difficult to pick-apart what's useful and what's useless, so you have to keep as much as possible without bias. All of that is on hard disks which violently spin around at 8 meters per second, accessed by software which we all know breaks every day but are too afraid to admit it, over a network of other computers with all the same flaws, distributed globally, yet can be significantly disrupted by one roadside construction worker and a jackhammer.

The internet didn't increase the lifetime of data; it decreased it. Sure, we have far more of it at our fingertips than any other point in history, but that's not lifetime; that's just volume. And that volume has desensitized us; its fundamentally impacting our innate biological memory capacity, and the social structures we form around memory. We know the Library of Alexandria existed because people wrote about it; the pages laid for thousands of years; its memory passed verbally from person to person.

If all computers stopped functioning tomorrow, not even disappear, they're still there, they just don't work: Would the memory of Stranger Things still be known in two thousand years? I doubt it, but: if the only thing which offers us a satisfying "Yes" is "we keep the computers running, accessible, indexable, searchable"; that seems, at the very least, given the extreme challenges we as a species will be facing over the next century, beyond the scope of human possibility

The Sun’s ability to function like an Earth-wide Eprom eraser might cause some catastrophic disruption given our reliance on the Internet and computing devices. A large enough geomagnetic/solar storm is not unprecedented.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event

I think it’s one of those things modern parents are going to have to understand about their brave new world, and teach their modern children. Like look both ways before crossing the street, remember that everything you write on the Internet is permanent, so think before you write, or if you don’t want to do that then at least write it under a pseudonym.

why does it have to be that way though?

you are stating the current status quo as unavoidable - why is that?

Archiving everything has a massive cost and if it were illegal to archive unless people consent it would be much harder to get away with it.

When I post to a public forum I gave that forum rights to publish what I said, I did not give everyone else the right to store what I said

> why does it have to be that way though?

That'll be -5 points for questioning the social credit system, Citizen.

I am not a lawyer but I think it would be legally difficult to make it illegal to record what people say and do in public spaces. That was a right that the entire Western media depended on long before the Internet was invented.

The crux may be whether websites that require you to login to use them, like Facebook, are considered public or not. But anything you say or do in Facebook that you don’t restrict to being viewable only by 1st degree friends is probably considered public.

> There is an interesting conundrum here, when we post to the internet do we also consent to having that information saved for all eternity?

I'm not sure about consent, but presume it will be 'stuck' and un-removeable from the net once it's out there. (So be careful what you disseminate). Some people even go out of their way to make sure certain content will never be forgotten from the web.

Yes. I think people need to understand that anything on the internet is by default, there forever. Post something privately or behind a password if you don't want everyone seeing it.

A lot of people think that the current status-quo is the only way forward. Why? There is no reason for it.

There is no practical reason why a forum could not have an optin-optout-delete API/protocol/etc that all search engines/archivers should follow.

When I delete something all should follow the orders and those that do not need to be responsible for it.

Of course there are plenty of business reasons why engines don't want to do it.

there are plenty of human reasons as well, as indicated by your usage of the word "should"

> all should follow the orders and those that do not need to be responsible for it

Furthermore the tide will be ordered back, the contents returned to Pandora's box, and universal entropy decreased. Failure to comply will result in a fine.

>There is no reason for it.

The reason is that bits are not physical. Anyone can copy them and re-upload them, without any cost.

This is the difference between "speech" and "text".

When you write a brief or a book, it's a performative act; you cannot pretend nothing was said.

The Internet is textual media, just like books, and unlike television or talking in the park.

If you don't like it, you can only burn books or drive modern technology in that direction

What blissful times we lived in before the daily drumbeat of “Accomplished young professional discovered to have said offensive things on the internet when they were a dumb teenager, reputation tarred and feathered for the rest of their life.”

we don’t know if it’ll be a lifelong thing though. I suspect with all this pushback and emotional exhaustion (and I really do believe it’s emotionally exhausting to constantly be hounding over peoples morality on the internet) people will just stop giving a shit about what someone said 5 years ago pretty soon.

It’s a numbers game. Billions of people won’t care, but a few dozen can make enough of a stink that a habitually risk averse institution would rather let someone be canceled than risk the controversy snowballing into something bigger.

Only if we let them.

There are all kinds of feedback cycles going on. Neither of these two are rational:

1. There are no ways to correct the problem you describe

2. The problem will correct itself without individuals and institutions making it happen

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