Fleeting memories of youth and the increasing impermanence of culture (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Fleeting memories of youth and the increasing impermanence of culture (2021)

datagubbe.se

76 pointsdusted43 comments

This piece made it poignant that continuity really doesn't come from things, it comes from relationships. There was an HN post about how life could be defined by cohering information forward in time, and things themselves don't do that without the living people and relationships to appreciate them and give them meaning. I was part of that early IRC scene and I still have a great deal of admiration for the nominally anonymous hackers who were a part of it even though we're not in touch these days. Their various nicks and aliases still occupy and represent ideals in my mind about competencies and values, and I even still think of some of them as legends and heroes, which is funny given we're really all just a bunch of very human geeks who were funny and just liked tech.

I've got lots of friends and family, but with age those things can fade, so several years ago I joined a fraternal organization to find and participate in some continuity that I could have a high degree of confidence would persist. For me, it's similar to the old hacking scene, where people become known for what they put into it and the quality of their work and it's not relevant or meaningful to anything outside of it, and the purpose is to just keep the thing going to provide the members with some source of continuity, a way and basis on which to relate, some stable landmarks, and when I'm old, those things and the relationships to them will still be in the same places. The old hacker networks and derivatives have been around for over 30 years, and they will probably still be around in some form 30 years from now, but only if you maintain them, as the t-shirts, photos, and code may exist, but over time it's their meaning that fades.

My grandparents and parents either experienced or personally knew people who lost everything at some point, through war, social strife, or economics, and personal tragedies. Same on my spouse's side. Physical photos and letters were among the few things that often survived, possibly because they are only of value to the original 'owner'. I think that close brush with the impermanence of belongings fueled the habits of preparing for loss by archiving and preserving physical mementos. People trust that digital artifacts will survive through redundancy, but we're so early in the process of testing that belief. And society has been rather stable in comparison to my grandparents' generation ...

Like all things: things survive as long as there are people with a will to maintain them. Will my hypothetical kids want my 10 TB archive of projects, photos, and videos enough to keep them stored and learn the tools needed to access them? Who knows. We can say archving has never been easier though.

I really doubt there's a future where archivists lose the ability to open a pdf, doc, jpg, or png, even if those are not standard formats supported by OSes in the future. The data will likely be there and accessible, but it's unknown if the interest will be there. Attention is already stretched to an atom-thick sheet. If that trend continues I can't imagine people caring about things that happened last week, let alone last century (most of the time).

My grandmother, who was a child in ww2 and experienced extreme resource scarcity after the war, would keep a lot of potted/preserved food in the cellar. After she passed, we didn't really see that as useful and dumped it all (it didn't appear particularly edible to us - maybe if you're starving.)

What I mean by that is, people probably only keep what is useful to them. And if your collection is seen as useful to some people in a couple decades isn't really easy to tell. Depends on the circumstances I'd say.

> And if your collection is seen as useful to some people in a couple decades isn't really easy to tell. Depends on the circumstances I'd say.

Though I think you can get a good idea by asking yourself questions like "what things of my grandfather's am I interested in?" and "what kinds of things of their grandfathers are people often interested in?"

Also, someone's always interested in genealogy. So I bet a short bio with a good photo, spread around in a few physical copies, will probably be preserved for quite some time.

You're right, and you're an optimist! But people lose things not just from a loss of will to maintain them, but rather also from events outside their control. The means to read digital media survive, but could events lead to the loss/corruption of the digital media itself. And the effort to maintain digital archives is sometimes large, especially when tech changes rapidly. Convenience trumps almost everything else! And I'm not talking about my kids. At some point, I'll be too old to deal with the digital archives on my own, but a box of pictures will be within reach.

My parents house burned down. They had 20 minutes to grab what they could before wildfire came.

My dad dumped out a box of full of gold to put the pet rabbit in the box.

Later on the wtf hit. Why did I not just put the rabbit on top of the gold.

Pepper the rabbit lived a long and happy life though.

Wouldn't gold survive the fire? Melting point is near 2000 degrees F

Ingots and sovereigns, perhaps. But jewellery would've taken some damage.

They were able to salvage some gold from fire. I think they got about 1,000 dollars of raw metal out of 100,000 worth of Coins

I keep thinking about starting a business where I take people’s blogs and produce them as professionally formatted books, mainly for these reasons. I am qualified to do it and making books is something I enjoy, but I don’t know if people would pay for it. Even after reading articles like this, it feels like something only me and none other people think about let alone value.

Have you thought about how people would pay for it for the writing/blogs of deceased loved ones?

The business is definitely there, a lot of art students have to turn their digital blogs and documents into physical books too for exhibitions

I want this desperately. I’ve got close to 8 years blogging with photos on Wordpress. It’s a diary of my son’s childhood.

I looked at the options… there are very few but currently I think the best is https://www.blookup.com/en/products/blog-book/wordpress/auth...

The price is decent. They split the blog into multiple volumes if needed. But I just don’t know about the quality. And there are very very few customizations. Just to get the date printed on each blog entry was difficult. I really want to customize it more. I have not pulled the trigger yet but probably will because the alternatives all suck.

All the other options I found could not consume my blog; it was too large or their scraping was just too poor. But these guys use some kind if Wordpress api to get the entries instead of scraping. And it works decently. They are in France I think so pages are A4 instead of American sizes.

I don’t know if you are on a Mac but I found out about Vellum yesterday: https://vellum.pub/

It might be a laborious manual process getting your content in there, but the results seem to look good and you don’t need to mess with LaTeX.

If you’re interested in just discussing further, joeld at protonmail.com. Like I say, making books from websites is just something I’ve been tinkering with for years, so I’d be happy to do a zoom call or whatever.

Thanks. I emailed you from a gmail account.

I think this is a pretty decent idea and I'll add a tangential market: personal wikis.

I have a couple personal Mediawikis I've used for various domains, like genealogy, that I'd like to have printed. I guess most especially it, as the impermanence of all digital content is painfully obvious there.

Would people really pay a professional to produce print-ready PDFs of their personal wikis, do you think? Or are you more thinking of a paid software product that would do it for them? The latter would be tough since wikis come in a million different forms.

Mediawiki is pretty standard though. I don't know if there are enough clients to justify the work, but it's something that's been on my mind for a while.

Someone mentioned Spolsky's book that did just that here on Hackernews -- and was met with whinging about how "crass" it is to reproduce and sell people's blog posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32110064

Personally, like you, I think this would be a neat service and can see the value in it -- but should you decide to make this your business, be aware that it will probably not be universally well received.

Right, the idea would be to preserve content in book form when hired to do so by the author. If they wanted to turn around and sell to the public that would be up to them, or they can just print copies for themselves/family/whatever.

I’m not familiar with Spolsky’s book, but I am familiar with the contributors and even know a couple. I tried looking through what was available in the "Look Inside" feature on Amazon, but I could not find any info on whether he obtained permission to reproduce those texts. In general I would be shocked if such a well known person did so without permission from so many high-profile authors. Of course, some of the blog posts may have been permissively licensed to begin with (CC-BY, e.g.) but I know not all of them were.

I'd hire you for this. I don't see an email or contact page on your profile, though.

As mentioned in another reply — feel free to email me at joeld at protonmail.com

For inspiration, see the Low-tech Magazine's Printed Website: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/low-tech-magazine-the-printe...

Currently three volumes of online articles on paper, and a fourth book with readers' comments. Around 2,400 pages of text and photos.

It is interesting to think back on the websites we created twenty or so years ago that we looked at only occasionally. We would check on them every year or two without realizing eventually that the server hosting them would be junked.

On the plus side storage is becoming cheaper. Avoiding the loss of our photos is a matter of the redundancy we build into our backup systems. Storing everything in the cloud? Better trust the service and pay attention if they ever go out of business. One backup is probably not enough really: that's how we lost so many websites in the first place. So stay redundant people.

Certainly some online games are examples that you can never go home to, but I think a lot of classic games are constantly in a state of rerelease or remaster. Vintage gaming is about level of effort. While you can't really go home, you can get pretty close.

For posterity: I think anyone really interested in these ideas of remembrance would enjoy reading Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time". It's very long, but I genuinely believe the length contributes meaningfully to helping you appreciate the weight of the insights portrayed in it. Basically I think the length helps you feel the passage of time better in a way that could not be truncated.

I think think the digital age is rendering Proust's key insight, that we associate memories with physical places/sensations, obsolete due to the inherent lack of physicality for our brains to work with. Recent work[1] in psychology/philosophy seems to be backing up Proust's observations more concretely, and it makes me wonder if projects like Dynamicland [2] will become more mainstream as we recognize the value of physical interaction in how we think.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition [2] https://dynamicland.org/

In case anyone actually attempts to dive into that work, a fair warning should be made that it is almost unfathomably dull.

To each their own. Frankly, I found a lot of solace in the dullness. Life is primarily comprised of dull moments and reading Proust helped me find more appreciation of the banality of life.

I only ever felt it was truly a slog in the Guermantes Way when some dinner parties would run about a hundred pages long.

It is a really well-written piece that resonates within me, but I am compelled to point out that not everything that the author speaks of is a lost cause. It would suit us better to stop brooding over it, and to focus instead on what can be done to alleviate the situation. Just to offer a few examples:

> When will we have time to sit down, alone or with our loved ones, and look through it all?

The For You page in the iOS Photos app is a good attempt at resolving this. Every now and then the app will notify you with an algorithmically curated album that somehow does very well at keeping out the random food-pics, sunsets, and unmemorable minutiae. This system has its flaws, but it is something. And it has the potential to be a lot better in the future.

> Will Youtube still be there in 50 years? Will Instagram and Dropbox?

Perhaps it is time initiatives like the Internet Archive and GitHub Archived Project were scaled up with better funding. Even for now a lot of cultural knowledge is there and it is safe. People in the distant future will have plenty to look back upon. There are archived copies of HN, Wikipedia, Reddit, and so on.

> If you're young today, your formative years depend on auto-deleted snapchat videos, short-lived memes, stories told in computer games likely unplayable in 30 years.

As someone still in their formative years in this era, I seem to have more mementos (both digital and physical) than my parents did at my age. The only difference seems to be that my photographs are digital and more numerous. Also, the games that my parents once played are unplayable now.

Could it be that everybody has the same experience of fading memories as they age, regardless of the era they were born in? I would think so. In that case it certainly isn't attributable to the change in lifestyle brought in by this century.

I agree with what you said about the Internet Archive and similar initiatives, hopefully they will do a reasonably good job at retaining important information in the future.

> Also, the games that my parents once played are unplayable now.

I don't understand this point, in my experience pretty much every game from the 70/80/90's is still playable with some kind of emulator, but many games from around 10-15 years ago are no longer playable because the servers went offline.

Counter take: these fleeting memories are not worth being saved.

A friend said it best: all your priceless mementos, souvenirs and photo albums will end up in a cardboard box taken to the trash. There're some examples right here about a grandmother carefully made potted/preserved food being put in the trash.

Why not skip the middleman and trash them yourselves? Odds are they are only worth it nostalgia value. Unless you want to optimize for pathological cases, like dementia in the article, I think it's better to optimize for making new experiences - and that requires freeing some "mental space".

Another example: music. Trash the collection of MP3s you listened to as a kid, and start anew! Buy (and therefore discover) new things instead of clinging to the old!

I suspect this won't be popular (notice this comment is currently at the bottom of the page), but I agree with this. I suppose I'm just temperamentally very much not a hoarder, but I grew up in the pre-www era and this doesn't really resonate with me. I never wrote much down, didn't save letters, didn't take photos or videos. It doesn't really make a difference to me that Facebook might go away and iCloud will delete my photos, because I don't have a Facebook profile and don't upload anything to iCloud anyway. This seems much closer to me to the baseline human experience anyway. For the vast majority of the time humans have existed, we had neither writing nor photography. While those things are important culturally for transmitting knowledge, I don't see every individual's personal memories as being something that matters to preserve.

My mom digitized a bunch of old betamax tapes five years ago and showed us the old videos when my wife and I visited for Christmas. It was interesting but not exactly critical to my life enjoyment that I be able to see school plays from kindergarten and my sister's 7th birthday party and whatever else she showed us. One of my very earliest, I supposed 3rd overall, friends, died when we were 12 from an allergic response, almost exactly like what happened in the film "My Girl." She was in some of these videos and it is the only photographic evidence of her existence I have. I don't feel like that added anything. In spite of not seeing an image of her for nearly three decades, I didn't forget her. And if I had forgotten her, well, I wouldn't be aware of it since that is what forgetting means. The sadness of forgetting is entirely abstract. No actual person is sad if no actual person remembers.

The most important thing is seeing and spending time with the people I still have.

As a counter-point confirming yours, my best friend in infancy died of cancer right before our fourth birthdays. My parents (still friends with his) have dozens of picture of us and even some just him. They don’t mean anything to me; I have absolutely no memory of him.

Interesting take, we couldn't disagree more! ^_^

Maybe you have a photographic memory (or gain nothing from reminisce).

Personally, for me, I have a terrible memory; I forget things that I am deeply emotionally connected to, or rather, I don't forget them, but I quickly become unable to access those memories, and I need something of a link to recall it, and when I do, all the emotion comes back with it and it gives me deep happiness.

Having something to browse through and examine gives me these links into my own memories, and allows me to remember and re-experience those things.

After we're gone, sure, if our mementos mean nothing to anyone else, they're thrown out. That does not matter the least, but you miss the point, that when that happens, we're not there to make use of them anyway! :)

"Only worth the nostalgia value", well I disagree both on your framing of nostalgia as having little value and of their singular use.

Also, especially music, does not change.. if you like it, you like it.. I still listen to the same CDs now at 36 as I did when I was 9.. (Megadeth and Iron Maiden never gets old to me!)

Thanks for your comment, interesting with an opposing view :)

> Maybe you have a photographic memory (or gain nothing from reminisce).

I don't know how my memory compares, but indeed I found I gained very little about reminiscing, so I stopped feeling bad about trying to follow a suggested model that didn't seem to give me any positive result.

Recent example: I took a week of vacation, for the first time since the pandemic so you could say it was important, yet I didn't take a single picture.

I enjoyed my vacation a lot, but before, I found the "need" to take picture was distracting. Worse: it created guilt when I didn't view the picture later. This time, I simply avoided the problem by not taking pictures: thus no distraction, and even better: no guilt possible either (because as usual I know I'd never check the pictures ever again... should I find a new type of guilt of not remembering, maybe it will incite me to view some of the previous pictures that I neglected? However I seriously doubt it will happen!

> Thanks for your comment, interesting with an opposing view :)

Same, it's interesting to see people optimize for very different things.

I write my loved ones letters and print out photos. You can too.

Start today. Write a letter and send it. Why not?

I just started printing photos and putting them up around my house and it provides me a surprising amount of joy.

The practice of letter writing has decreased in volume to the extent that it is not unlikely that, if the trend continues, postal services will be discontinued at some point in the future. Perhaps business letters, official letters and ads will keep the services afloat, but even if many people can barely hand-write a letter anymore.

I lament this development as I enjoyed writing letters to friends up to the late 1990s.

It is true that a lot of media are very volatile; the Web is rapidly changing and the only protection from loss is archive.org (make sure to submit your blog there if you care about its content's online preservation). As has been pointed out by others before, future historians will not have an easy time researching our days due to the lack of physical information artifacts (letters, diaries).

I realized the cloud ownership problem a few years back and bought a Synology NAS so I can own my own cloud, really happy with the decision

i keep and show all my 40,000+ photos as random screen saver, on a screen in kitchen (Otherwise they're some useless gigabytes). The randomizing is terrible (as longest random shuffle is about ~2000 items, above that.. not very random), but sometimes it digs interesting ones :) completely forgotten, places or people..

> Some of it - most of the photos, surely - had a good chance of survival back then, because they were just as likely to also have been printed on glossy photo paper or burned on CD:s, now resting somewhere at the bottom of a drawer or in an attic.

I wouldn't hold out much hope for photos burned on a CD-R and stored in an attic.

Paper photos might survive for decades. CDs not so much.

Some of the writeable CDs I made 20 years ago are still readable. (Some contained music digitized from cassettes that were already 20 years old ... not in very good shape either.)

In 2005 I ripped hundreds of commercial music CDs to 192k mp3s on a new 80G SATA drive. (Kept the CDs in Logic cases - seem to be fine.) For 12 years that drive sat untouched in a cardboard box, in a closet. Then put it into an external USB enclosure and copied all 45Gs to my then-current HD. All good. (That little-used 80G HD failed within a year.) Since, drive-to-drive.

OTOH the B&W family photos from most of a century ago (the bulky albums thrown away) seem as good as when I first saw them.

Like most of the writings of the ancient Greek philosophers, culture is always transient. As were films on nitrate. As are most consumer 'easy solutions'. Archiving & preservation rewards the effort. Thanks mostly to the efforts of the old-time-radio fans, I can still listen to shows from the 1930s.

Very nice essay. And do as I do: Always print your photos. Not all of them. Just the good ones.

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