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Comment by MomsAVoxell | Hacker News Reader

I am am an amateur recordist, I absolutely love to bootleg concerts and gigs and things, as in: make my own recordings of live music and so on. I have shared everything in the appropriate places, also. I believe it is an essential artistic expression: to record the nature of the world around you for the future.

So, I do it a bit.

I think this ethos can be applied in many ways and with different media; preservationism is a high value objective. The future needs it, kinda.

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This reminds me I have some film that I need to get digitized and uploaded to IA. From what I can tell they are clips from concerts in the Chicago area in the 1980s. And I think this proves GPs point, because to be honest I personally have no interest in live music, but when I found those in a can at a thrift store for $20, you bet your ass I bought them to be preserved and not turned into someone's ill-advised art project (or something equally destructive). When I see something that I know /someone/ will value I will always do what I can to save it from destruction/the trash/someone who doesn't know the value.

> to record the nature of the world around you for the future

That's cool.

> The future needs it, kinda.

Agreed but we seem to be in the minority seeing that most people nowadays seem to be speed running to make Asimov's Foundation into a documentary.

On one side, the dominant consumer society we live in is extremely busy churning through anything that can be sold as a product and then thrown away so that the new can replace them. Buildings go up as quickly as they come down, and we digitize books just to destroy them in pursuit of productivity gains we may or may not ever get. And of course, conflicts and war continue to destroy priceless artefacts, like they've always done.

On the other side, when you consider objective metrics, I don't think humanity ever spent so much effort and resources into preserving the past as today. Archaeology was basically invented less than 250 years ago, and now it's everywhere and continuously expanding. A lot of places are now not even allowed to change, museums are plentiful and overflowing, and the internet created a completely new world of human creation that we are increasingly trying to preserve (IA etc).

It's a mixed picture.

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