Does it bother you that you have forgotten most of the experiences in your life? In many cases, you’re not aware of what you’ve forgotten. There will be experiences that you could remember, at least hazily, if you tried. There will be experiences that you don’t know whether you would remember because you don’t think of them unless reminded. I was recently going through my diaries from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. Frequently, I exclaimed with delight (or distress dulled by time): “Oh God, I’d forgotten about that!”
For those of us who advocate radical life extension, the preservation of memories has added importance. Suppose we lived for 200 years, to take a number at random. How much do you think you would care about the memories of your experiences when you were 20? Or 50? Or 100? One person I’ve known for decades prizes the preservation of as many memories as possible. He thinks that losing memories is losing part of yourself.
I have a different perspective. I’m more concerned about retaining my dispositions and values. I want to retain some important, formative memories but am less concerned about losing 99% of my experiences. If there isn’t a significant downside, I would prefer to keep all memories. You never know when you might enjoy a trip down memory lane, even enjoying the old trivialities of days past. Part of my doctoral dissertation in philosophy examined the various psychological components that constitute our identity (or survival).
But this piece is not so much about personal memories – although it definitely is to a degree – as it is about preservation of information in the world as a whole. A few days ago, I read Mike Solana’s latest Pirate Wires blog, “Encyclopedia Titanica.” I always enjoy Mike’s blog pieces and recommend that you take a look. (I even pay for my subscription. It’s that good!) In this case, my thoughts are less aligned with his than usual.
Mike starts with Google’s recent announcement that it would be deleting inactive accounts, including Gmail, Drive, YouTube, and Blogger. This means removing “countless public posts comprising entire chapters of our recent history.” I have been receiving alerts from Amazon about the coming end of my photo storage there (which I don’t use). Mike also laments, “In 2009, Yahoo shut down GeoCities, an early entrant in the space of online “neighborhoods” now totally lost to time, a kind of fading that would have taken centuries in our prior human age of paper bound in leather.” We’ve also seen the end of GeoCities and MySpace. (MySpace is so deleted that my spellchecker doesn’t recognize it.)
But today it’s clear that everything we do online is temporary, not permanent, and it can’t be overstated how different that is from what we all expected in the early 2000s, back when our entire civilization was trading analog for digital.
Mike grants that, without the internet, many subcultures would never have existed. But what the net gives it can take away. When pre-internet subcultures evaporated, at least their most weighty books, zines, songs, and articles would be preserved. But, says, Mike, “This is not true of any subculture native to the internet.” He notes that the last physically bound Encyclopedia Britannica was published in 2010, symbolically marking the end of an ancient approach to record-keeping
This surely exaggerates the difference between the permanence of pre- and post-internet content. Many books have been forever lost – most famously in the burning of the Library of Alexandria. As time went on, the complete loss of books became less common as copies became more widely distributed. Other forms of content, especially those that were not terribly popular at the time, have disappeared irretrievably. Probably many special interest zines cannot be found anywhere.
Recently, I wanted to take a look at issues of Biostasis, a (very) small circulation newsletter I published in the mid-1980s. I was despondent to discover that I didn’t have any copies. (I still have other significant items from those years.) Inquiries to several other people who might have had copies yielded nothing. This was material I wanted for a talk on the history of cryonics in the United Kingdom. Thinking of the numerous small publications that used to be reviewed in Factsheet Five, no doubt many of those have either vanished or would be tremendously hard to unearth.(Some of the zines reviewed in FF have been archived at the New York State Library.)
Vast amounts of video has been lost to entropy. The BBC made itself unpopular by throwing out (or taping) over a huge number of TV program recordings. If you have a favorite show from your childhood, you may not ever be able to watch it again. Even some episodes of a cultural phenomenon such as Doctor Who have shuffled off this mortal coil.
I was reminded of this recently when, as part of the same attempt to find my old copies of Biostasis, I thought about the second time I appeared on TV, back in 1987 on the Terry Wogan Show. I appeared in the illustrious company of Shirley Bassey, James Burke, and Imran Kahn. Alas, my mother taped over the episode accidentally. As far as I know, this is one of the bits of TV that no one exists.
So, the change in content permanence with the rise of the internet is not as black and while as Mike portrays. Plenty of pre-Internet stuff is gone. And, while it’s true that plenty of online content has disappeared, that doesn’t have to be the case for things we value. One handy source for deleted website material is, of course, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
The social media with which I’m familiar allow you to download your online material for backup. I’ve done that but have never looked at it, but presumably that works. Perhaps GeoCities and MySpace didn’t make that possible (or did they?) but there’s nothing to stop you preserving your social media content if you really think it’s worth it. (I’m more interested in preserving my decades of emails.) If you don’t want to preserve your photos and videos yourself, you can buy perpetual storage from Forever.com.
Personally, I like to preserve everything of real significance. If it could be done easily and cheaply, I would preserve every experience. One day, I can use a computer to scan through it all and find things that interest me. But, culture-wide, there’s a lot of ephemera that’s not worth preserving. Mike mentions the likely generation of billions of AI-generated novels and poems that no one will ever read. How much of a loss it that?
My thoughts on what counts as ephemera are personal and others may have different views. Some may not care about preserving anything except major events and defining experiences. Others, such as my friend, may find it important to preserve everything. If you care about old Facebook exchanges, you can save them and back them up. Falling storage costs make it ever more feasible to store photos and video.
The contents of old email lists and even current ones may be more difficult. The Extropians email list – one of the very first forums for serious discussion of technology, science, philosophy, and the future has mostly survived and many years of content have been archived in multiple places. Those discussion will provide a trove of ideas of considerable historical importance.
It’s interesting to me that Mike seems to take an impersonal approach to the loss of online information. He doesn’t mention losing his own cherished information or communities (although maybe he was part of one of the terminated communities without saying so). I wonder whether he is concerned about losing biologically stored memories, perceptions, and experiences. This seems to matter to most people to a fair degree and even more to most of us who aim for an exceedingly long life. Lifelogging could help with this but currently it’s a pain. It’s challenged enough to keep a diary!
Mike notes the importance of remembering how things actually were – or at least how they seemed at the time – rather than being completely subject to later revisions. As he notes, recently we have discovered the stealth rewriting of loved works of fiction. We are also seeing people rewrite their online messaging while pretending they always believed what they now say. (“Oceana has always been at war with Eurasia.”) I would add examples such as Canada’s Justin Trudeau recently claiming that he always acknowledged concerns about the Covid vaccine and supported individual choice. Video exists to clearly show that to be a lie.
I share this concern. However, we are seeing these historical revisionists being busted. So long as they do not control all the places where the information is stored, it is possible to find the earlier, differing statements. Important statements by influential people presumably will be stored in numerous locations and not hard to find. Also, rewriting the past predates the internet. Orwell’s fictional Oceana/Eurasia mirrors the actual practice of totalitarian regimes such as the former Soviet Union. It may be harder, not easier, to stop people getting away with revising the past since far more people have access to the information and can archive it.
In the end, I’m much less worried than Mike seems to be about losing online content. To the extent that we worry about the loss of personal content, a bit of effort invested will yield results in terms of redundant backups. We might also protect and support efforts to retain documentation at least of important events. However, as I’ve said, it seems hard to get away with destroying or universally altering historical information.
P.S.
For a fascinating piece on the nature of books and how e-books differ and may further evolve, I recommend Matthew Guay’s “In Pursuit of a Better Book.”