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Comment by anitil | Hacker News Reader

Can I recommend a podcast called 'Stuff the British Stole' by Marc Fenell (aka 'That Movie ... Guy'). It looks at exactly this, including situations where an artefact only exists _because_ it was stolen.

http://www.marcfennell.com/stolen (Sorry I couldn't find the RSS feed)

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Links:

PODCAST MAIN PAGE: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/stuff-the-brit...

RSS FEED: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/stuff-the-brit...

Ah thankyou I was looking on his page and could only see Spotify/Apple Podcasts

The issue of "this is a convenient thing to think if you want to feel less bad about stuff being stolen" aside, it's worth considering that a world in which these things weren't stolen might also be a world where colonialism didn't run rampant throughout the world and the "destruction" they were saved from may have been a consequence of that colonialism.

Anyways, I think to some extent our civilization is descending into a kind of mass packrat disorder. We seem to fetishize preservation to an unhealthy degree on both small and large scales. Sometimes things break, are burnt down, or are left unmaintained until they die. But new things are created all the time, and maybe sometimes we get a little too stuck on the old stuff and don't acknowledge the new.

Kids these days. If they’re not addicted to novelty and the social media algorithm, they’re freebasing historical preservation. I’m honestly not sure how you square the circle between obviously consumerist trends like fast fashion and mass-produced “collectibles” with fetishization of preservation and franchise-based popular culture. It kind of seems like different people like different stuff?

Of course if you’re talking about architecture, there’s lots of fetishization of the not-very-old stuff from last century, because They don’t want you to know that we lost the building techniques of the Tartarian Empire. Or something.

Even within disposable consumer goods people stick random products from the 80s in plexiglass and call it precious and sell it for hundreds of thousands of dollars. There's an idea out there that actually "using" a product like an old video game is somehow debasing it. In the end though I don't think people have much choice on the consumer product side of things. It is what it is for various reasons.

But really I'm talking about broader social trends and what we do at the society level. Yes, architecture. Mustn't tear down that building that no one has been able to live in for 20 years, it's sacred. But also relics, ideas, monuments to even monumentally stupid and awful things, etc.

We should upload historical artifacts to the Blockchain and they will live forever as NFTs.

Problem solved

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