Shining a light on the digital dark age
longnow.org
Shining a light on the digital dark age
1–10 of 137 posts
Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age
#2Good. Every time we forget the old world, we reinvent it better
Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age
#3Good. Every time we forget the old world, we reinvent it better
That is so true. Use to be that slaves knew they were slaves. We’re much better at hiding that.
Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age
#4I've been noticing this a lot lately in one of my little hobbies of Halloween events. There's so much history from events in the early 2000s that has been lost. So many links in ancient web forums that 404 and aren't in the Internet archive. Info from the 2010s is much better but still missing a lot of media. As an individual, I certainly don't have the resources of some of the organizations listed in this article but I've been trying to do what I can and mirror important sites. I dread seeing what the future looks like as more and more of the communities in my niche move onto discord and away from more traditional web forums.
ETA: The issue I face is two-fold. More pressingly, there are files just missing. Nothing I can do about that barring someone magically having them downloaded to an old PC. But also interesting is working with old formats. The 2000s/early 2010s Halloween Horror Nights websites were all written in Flash. They have tons of little Easter eggs and information for the event obsessives like me. Between fan backups and the Internet archive, the files are pretty complete thankfully. But since Flash has been dead for a while, I have to rely on the Ruffles Flash emulator to get it running on the web. But that doesn't work super well. On my list of things to do is to contribute to the project to try to get some of the files working.
In case anyone is curious about my backup of the event or if you're also a fan and have any of the files listed to share and archive, my site is hhncrypt.com!
Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age
#5Good. Every time we forget the old world, we reinvent it better
If this wasn’t true, we couldn’t know it.
Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age
#6Good. Every time we forget the old world, we reinvent it better
Or we think we do, giving ourselves a much needed boost to ego and letting the cycle continue and keep everyone happy. Always assuming that we have made things "simple" because we know our way and not someone else's etc. That being said there's a lot of progress in the end but we take a lot of steps backwards to get there.
Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age
#7Good. Every time we forget the old world, we reinvent it better
>Every time we forget the old world, we reinvent it better
Historically that has not been the case for most of human history. As odd as it might seem, in general the rediscovery of the accomplishments ancient world has been a great driver towards progress. The periods when the accomplishments of the past were lost and fully forgotten were the sorts of times people call Dark Ages.
Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age
#8Imgur recently purged an untold number of pictures from their servers. How much knowledge has simply been discarded because it was too expensive to keep it?
Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age
#9Looks like the article in question is getting the hug of death. But information is being lost in droves even today. Entire YouTube channels can vanish overnight, for various reasons, taking years of content with them. Without any backups floating around out there this stuff is gone forever, and this is assuming we even know about any backups.
Re: Shining a light on the digital dark age
#10Good. Every time we forget the old world, we reinvent it better
It's not reinvented, it's iterated, knowingly or not. And, you can only move towards optimization by knowing your derivative.