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And disappearing is the default, natural state of things.Books, clay tablets, scrolls, engraved stone, to which humans owe their entire knowledge of their premodern history, seem to have put up pretty well against entropy. The same is not the case for information disseminated in a controlled manner from privately owned servers.
> If I see some people playing music on a corner and return the next night to see they've left, I may be wistful, but it would be silly to argue "playing live music is broken and we should fix it".
> If you think of web sites as performances put on for a limited time by the server, it doesn't seem so terrible that they disappear after a while.
Thankfully, the generations who produced and preserved knowledge on paper, clay and stone before the onset of digital technology - that is, every generation of humans that has ever lived, except ours - did not think of books and libraries as throwaway pamphlets. And it would take more than an arbitrary interchange of modes of cultural production to argue that we should be doing otherwise in the technological circumstance we find ourselves in.
The "tyrants of the server" are not thinking of server-centric aggregation and dissemination of as a performance put on for a limited time: they are betting on it as the future of all human literary activity. Google doesn't want to read you a paragraph, take your money and say goodbye; it wants to swallow all the world's books and information, chop it to tiny pieces, store and own it forever, and extract the maximum profit from each tiny piece, without having you pay a penny. And it wants you to come back for more. The persistence of the server-centric model of content dissemination is not an accident; it is dictated by the political economy of the web brought about by the Googles of the world.