re: #105 Shiplord Kirel: Fan of USPS, Goodyear, and Oreo
But see, there’s plenty we don’t know about the era of the construction of the Pyramids, because a lot of knowledge has been lost.

I tend to think long-term preservation of knowledge actually becomes a more difficult problem as records become digital. Many file formats, encoding/decoding algorithms, and storage methods are currently proprietary and under patent. By analogy, imagine a huge chunk of the world’s digital knowledge having been stored solely on 8-Track. All the K-Tel Greatest Hits collections in existence wouldn’t save us from the fact that there is no longer any working hardware that can play back 8-track here in the year 2137, and perpetual patents prevent anyone from building one.

Example, kinda: Frank Zappa died leaving a huge amount of unfinished and unreleased music in his (literal) vault. To his credit or to his fault, he was an early-adopter of various digital recording technologies in the 1980s. When a serious attempt was made to explore what was in the vault, it was found that quite a lot of his material was recorded in obscure digital formats for which there remains literally no means of playing it back. Companies long dissolved, technologies long obsolete and abandoned. These things are probably lost forever. I figure a lot of modern culture will suffer a similar fate.

I have a collection of paper photographs handed down and discarded by my various ancestors. The photos date back to the late 1800s. They are of no particular significance except to the extent that they accurately depict the age in which they were made. I think about how photos are treated these days. Digital photography, for all its convenience, makes it entirely too easy to discard snapshots whose significance might not become apparent until years or decades later.

I could extend this rant into ideas like the way modern buildings are constructed, such that pretty much every modern house and retail structure has a life expectancy of less than 50 years, but I’m tired of typing and nobody cares anyway.

What was I saying?