There's No Ghosts in the Machine if You Can't Turn it On
I often think about the fragility of the web
It's inherently
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There's hundered and hundreds of hours of things I have written that have been lost to time.
Victims of dead websites and forums.
Other times purged unceremoniously and without warning by the fickle whims of our digital content overlords
(years and years worth of writing and poetry gone in a flash on Myspace)
Sure, we could create backups, but time and entropy aren't on our side there either.
As far as I have read, HDD can be expected to last anywhere from 3-5 years on average,
while SSDs are uncretain since they are newer and there isn't as much real world data
but estimates put them to about 10 years
Either way, this is a dismal lifespan in terms of being a container to archive knowledge.
My kindle just died after maybe a 10 year lifespan add or subtract a few years.
A testament to the fickle and capricious nature of electronics and especially of
digital media that requires hardware to be useful at all.
Meanwhile we still have a shelf
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...of these guys that have texts from hundreds of years ago.
Will we be able to say the same for the internet and all of our
digitized knowledge in 500 years, 300 or even a 100 years from now?!
Already too many webpages to count have been irretrivably buried under
the sands of time's inexorable cascade into the bottom of the hourglass.
As evidenced by the amount of dead links and defunct websites you encounter using
the wayback machine on archive.org
Is our current age doomed to be only partially understood?
Forever lost without the most pivotal and ncessary of all contexts to understand our age?
THE
:
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_| _| _|_| _| _| _|_|_|_| _|_|_| _| _| _|_|_| _|_|_| _|_|_|_| _| _| _|_|_|_| _|_|_|
For future archaeologists the impetus to studying this period of the past just might be
the impediment of finding working components to read data from our antiquated hardware or somehow reverse-engineering them if able.
But even then...
Would there be anything to look for?
Would our ghosts still be haunting these little machines?
...
There's no ghosts in this machine
only an
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