> allowing for a randomly discovered shrink wrapped headset twenty years from now to be able to update to the final software version, long after over-the-air update servers have been shut down. This resonates so much with me. Each time I setup a new device that requires an Internet connection, I think about how we can enjoy booting 30 years old retro computers and how the next generation will not be able to do the sa…
The same is true of some of the best work being done on the web, such as the NYTimes interactive infographics. Because they are so JS-heavy, and reliant on CI/CD pipelines for deployment, on custom CMSes, there is no way to archive them in the way that static pages containing just text and images can be archived on the Wayback Machine. Heck, even Flash projects from 15 years ago still run fine when compiled on Ruffle…
Welcome to the world of digital archiving. It's an enormously complicated space, and even for just my own personal projects and content, I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to ensure things are future proof and can be archived easily.
As a simple example, building my personal website atop Markdown ensures that, even if the formatting can't be preserved, the core content will be since it's simple ASCII (yes, that's ignoring issues of long-term digital storage and access and so forth, but at least it's not also a bunch of binary blobs or database formats or whatnot).
Equally alarming is that fact that so much of our digital lives aren't even in our control. A historian used to be able to rely on family archives, public libraries, etc, to understand our past. A hundred years from now they'll be looking back and hoping someone somewhere preserved the contents of an S3 bucket before Amazon decided to delete it on a whim...