Chopping books in half

GitHub is archiving all the repositories by etching them onto quartz glass with a femtosecond laser. It should last 10,000 years.

https://archiveprogram.github.com/

My books are increasingly decoration and a statement of identity that utility objects. I buy hard-copies of books I might like to have on display, mostly, and mainly care about keeping those books I have a sentimental attachment to because of where and when I read them rather than for the sake of maybe one day re-reading it. It's increasingly rare for me to pick them up to read.

But one thing that has made me think about this for years is that part of the reason I have read the books I have was growing up surrounded by my dads book-collection, and parts of the music I listen to are down to exploring my parents record collection. And even the books I never got around to reading but were aware of were part of what connected me to my parents, and by extension to the previous generation.

The more the media we consume gets siloed into apps, the more it alters how the transmission of culture happens. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's something we ought to be aware of and consider the effects of, because it makes it seem likely to me at least that the generational gaps are going to get bigger as filter bubbles contribute to make it less likely for children to explore and learn to understand previous generations (and vice versa) - e.g. I see how vastly different my sons Netflix account looks like vs. mine. Of course part of that is natural - he's presented material suited for younger viewers (though not using a "childrens profile" as that excludes a lot of his favourite anime), but because it also so strongly skews towards the interests he has demonstrated, it exclude a lot of child friendly material he probably would like, based on my experience showing things to him, but that doesn't match what he's watched on there so far, and so the bubble self-reinforces.

And unlike the physical environment of the past there isn't the same strong presence of alternative suggestions in the form of seeing passively what parents like - countering that with recommendations is not easy.

I'm not particularly sentimental about this, but I do wonder what the long term effects on society will be as those ties are increasingly loosened, and it also places those who control those recommendation systems in an incredibly powerful position to shape culture and identity, and I'm not sure whether we should be more concerned of the risk of that being consciously abused by someone at some point vs. the unintended consequences of not consciously managing it.

It feels like we're sleepwalking into something. It could very well turn out amazingly well, but it could also turn out badly, and we don't seem to understand what the impacts may be.

We have lost huge proportions of ancient writings because of the amount of resources making and maintaining enough copies took, and the resulting physical destruction.

A lot of works that we know had a big impact on culture, for example, are only known through us through quoted fragments in the works of others. Heraclitus "On Nature" (though even the title is not certain) is one example - a work significant enough that over a hundred fragments were preserved through quotations in the work of others significant enough for their works to have survived, but still the fragments makes up only a tiny portion of his work.

And for every significant work we have fragments of, or know of, there are bound to be huge numbers of works we don't know of because they were only ever mentioned in other works we have lost.

We may have become better at protecting paper copies, but they still require someone to carefully maintain the archives and ensure new copies are made once, inevitably, the number of copies of the works will dwindle with damage.

Having it on paper does not remove the need of an archivist; and the sheer volume required for paper copies means that even with a tiny number of locations suffering environmental damage every year, over time the number of copies will dwindle and new copies will need to be made.

This is true of digital copies as well, but the ease of making them and the density makes it increasingly possible to store larger number of copies, and re-copy them regularly. The biggest hindrance today, I think, is curating the increased volume of material published only, more than the challenge of ensuring there are enough copies.

> So if you have an archive on 5 1/4 inch floppies from, say, thirty years ago and a printed copy I think that the printed copy is likely to be the only one that is now readable.

The amount of archived productions of material for home computers from further back than that suggests that while if there is only a single archive extant, chances are you might be right, it doesn't take many copies before the odds of successful complete retrieval are quite good.

Sure, there is a risk there will be a gap in which we lose material that was only published on more perishable material, but that would by no means be the first time that has happened either - what survives to date is largely the subset that was important enough to be made available in the most durable means and then copied and re-copied because people at the time found them important; not by any means everything.

> They already have data from both the National Disk and Community Disk online and are currently investigating copyright issues before releasing the URL to the general public.

> ...

> It is likely that the Domesday Project will not be completely free of copyright restrictions until at least 2090 (assuming no further extensions of copyright terms).

Copyright is a huge impediment to the long-term preservation of digital cultural artifacts, mitigated by the people's willingness (and technical ability, for now) to ignore it.

That only works if someone puts in the effort to actually keep copying this data.

Personal anecdote time:

I work for a large games developer, at a studio that has existed for 30 years now. Recently we've dug out some archived material for the very first games the studio worked on, and guess what? It's nearly all lost. 9/10 floppies don't read at all. As far as we can tell, the source code for those original games from 1990-1995 is completely lost because we can't read any of the source media. Even some later archives are useless, I have a full spindle of Kodak CD-R discs burnt in 1998 and literally none of them read, the underside has turned translucent, never seen that before. Some other brands(Sony, TDK) survived a lot better and most of those CDs still read, but if we left this work for another 10-20 years it would probably all be gone completely.

And then guess what has survived absolutely fine? All design documents actually printed on paper. Actual drawings, notes, scribbles from designers - all of that we have and it's perfectly readable. But source code saved digitally is gone. It's a massive shame really.