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Comment by lancesells | Hacker News Reader

Impermanence is a part of life. Things are born, live, and then die. I sympathise with the creators and fans of works that disappear due to economics but I don't really know if most media leaving us is a loss to humanity.

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I've been thinking about this recently and am somewhat concerned that we're moving towards a world where every single interaction between person and machine, and increasingly between two people or even between a person and the physical environment, is being recorded and stored for eternity. There's just so much potential for abuse here.

> environment, is being recorded and stored for eternity

I'd posit, precisely, that it isn't eternity. But a putative eternity or an "implied" eternity ...

... but nowhere near that in actual practice, to the point of being potentially ephemeral, to our detriment.-

(Naught of which subtracts from your valid concerns, where warranted ...)

PS. Further, the notion of "eternity" in digital storage is more rhetorical than literal. The idea of data being stored indefinitely suggests permanence that is, in reality, quite fragile. Technological obsolescence, data degradation, and the fragility of storage mediums make true perpetuity unlikely.-

While we speak of "eternal" digital footprints, the actual lifespan of this data is dictated by evolving technology, legal changes, and human intervention. This illusion of permanence can lead to a false sense of security or unnecessary paranoia. Recognizing the difference between theoretical possibilities and practical realities is crucial. The concept of "eternal" digital storage is far more ephemeral than it appears, and this impermanence could pose both risks and reassurances.-

For nearly all of history, virtually all communication was unrecorded, which is a significant step below being recorded and made freely available to anyone who looks for it for maybe a decade or so, which is the current level of impermanence being decried.

For the record - and to differentiate - the impermanence being pointed out would exist regarding publications, public works - output meant for circulation.-

Panopticons and surveillance are different matters.-

I'm not talking about surveillance. I'm saying that, until recently, pretty much all the casual discussion of the sort that ends up on most forums would've been spoken and so maximally impermanent. Only a very tiny portion of communication was ever written down before texting and the internet.

We don't know tons of stuff about history because of lost information. The Library of Alexandria had tons of valuable information. The internet should be a way to get around that but...

As a history enthusiast, it’s both thrilling and concerning to think about how much we could potentially learn from our current era, yet still face the risk of losing it. The Library of Alexandria was a monumental repository of knowledge, and its loss left a significant gap in our understanding of the past.

(And, our understanding of our present ...)

People seem to think that South-of-Sahara Africa is "history-less" because of a lack of written history (there were griots, whose oral history might have provided a base for archaeological inquiry in the same way ancient writings with unreliable narrators, if not for the social disruptions of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries); South America was treated similarly until archaeological rediscoveries helped to expand our understanding or pre-Colombian life and broaden imaginations.

Anyway, none of the civilizations in these regions had built nuclear technology, or influenced the emergence of treatment-resistant diseases, or generally altered the landscape to such an extent as we have (dams, holes in the ground, big tall chunks of metal and concrete). It is probably in the best interests of anyone living on this planet in the next few thousand years that they have some knowledge of how we've lived and why. "We built weapons that can each destroy land a day's walk wide because there was a war where the stakes were genocide" is maybe something that shouldn't be forgotten. Any number of other developments are also important. It's hard to tell in the moment what will be so in the future.

> It's hard to tell in the moment what will be so in the future.

Another good reason for widespread archival.-

We need something akin to the tunnels beneath the library, where they wisely kept some of the most valuable items - that were thus spared :)

I think we used to call those torrents on the Internet.

Totally see your point, granted. But it was the permanence of our knowledge and science and wisdom and arts throughout the ages that has - to some degree - given us progress. A collective memory.-

The further problem is that this impermanence is, structurally, a "default" for the current, dominating media - whereas it was only a fraction of knowledge that was lost or vanished when the imperative modes of transmission were "permanent-by-default".-

Further, methinks, we would be missing on a great opportunity - enabled by technology - to make knowledge permanent and accesible - going a bit beyond, from remedial action to constructive action ...

The other side of that goes to impermanence as a feature, the "right to be forgotten" and such aspects ...

... which are also important and in league with the "natural" entropy you rightly point out exists ...

... but the pressing problem is - methinks - on the other side of that spectrum, the side of guaranteeing what up to very recently had been a feature of information media: Its capacity to transcend time, and remain.-

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