Technology

i want to watch the corporations burn too. but we’re losing something we’ll never get back.

This perfectly highlights the precarious situation we are in. We have collectively decided to put A LOT of Internet history on a few centralized places that don't really care about data as profit, and now it is coming back to bite us in the rear. We will lose a lot of history that we can never easily get back, whether it is deleted, or siloed behind a login/paywall screen.

Take, for example, Twitter burning down. It affects everyone negatively. Think of all the important conversations going on about race, gender, sexuality, and protests and movements, that will be lost to time. Think of all the artist who have posted work on there, only to discover they have to shift to a new platform literally overnight because no one can see their artwork and there is a mass exodus. Think of how good reputable news sources are becoming even more fragmented as reputable, trustworthy actors flee Twitter, turning it into a swamp of misinformation and disinformation.

Now take this scenario, and spread it across all the major sites, keeping in mind how all sites rely on each other to be useful, so damage becomes exponentially worse as more large sites decide to do restrictive policies that trap users and data within their sites. As a result, information cannot travel as freely between boundaries. Now taking into account all the damage that has been done, the Internet won't be the frontier of possibility and community as it once was, but rather another cash cow, and medium of distribution: it will become like a more interactive version of TV.

I wish we could go back to the mid 2000s/early 2010s era of the Internet...I miss those days... Sorry for doom ranting a little, it's just the Internet as a concept is important to me.

Typical digital media is ridiculously short lived compared to everything else humanity has used to store information so far. Five years? Ten? Conserving any digital data is this act of juggling where if you drop the ball it's gone; you're constantly replicating and updating. We see the "cloud" as some bulletproof storage but long term it's up in the air really.

In a bright note, the NSA have copies of everything already.

I even found an old diary entry of mine today that linked to one of my own facebook posts, and that link had already rotted. Ugh.

Damn this comment is giving me Talos Principle Road to Gehenna vibes