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| title | emoji | date | tags | summary | topics | draft | ||||||
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| Sneakernet Archive | 👟 | 2024-08-22T10:24:41.349Z |
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I have a vision for sharing and storing community artefacts (eg. photos, stories) that's super easy for people, but also technically excellent for long-term archival. |
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I've been slowly working on, and advocating for, changes to bits of software (including my favourite, IPFS, the InterPlanetary File System) to make it suitable for communities without (good) internet access to share and keep cultural artefacts in a way that'll last the ages. I realised I've been slowly doing this for years now, but I've never written about it — so it's time to share!
Why distributed digital archival is important
I adore the internet and the web (I've made a living from it!) but it is a very alive thing — constantly changing and augmenting what it is, how its constituent parts are operated, and how they interconnect. Like all living things, one day it will die. I don't see that as happening soon, but without a significant global shift in how we fund species-wide infrastructure it'll likely be something less freely available and open. This poses a problem for cultural artefacts.
Where sons would write letters to fathers announcing something culturally significant in a way that's still legible hundreds of years later; today entire archives of cultural artefacts can be deleted without notice after only 40 years to save corporate money. One day Google Photos will join the graveyard of its services that are no longer profitable, and your cultural archives will be lost to the void (assuming you set up inactive account manager, and your digital estate was an interesting enough legacy to keep!)
Separately, while the internet is ubiquitous in my (and I presume your) world, only ~63% of the global population uses the internet, but at least 15% more have access to a computer and likely almost all of these expect that their data, and data they rely on, will just always be there.
Combine with this that physical storage isn't much better: the dye on burnt CDs can fade after just 5 years, USB drives & SD cards can see "bit-rot" after 10 years, HDDs will likely have half-demagnetised after ~70 years.
To counteract all of this decay — to keep cultural artefacts alive — they need to be always available, copied (even to new storage technologies) regularly (and with error correction) and, above all, be used and available.