Countless firsthand accounts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have disappeared across the last decade, and it may speak to larger issues with the historical record in the digital age.
Meanwhile archive sites are getting sued by greedy copyright owners
So, in short, the whole “just someone else’s computer” thing will always come back to bite you. And of course, we’re still struggling with this. Here on the Fedi, everything is tied up on servers run by admins we know little about without much recourse to download archives or migrate, unless you’re up for full self hosting.
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I increasingly suspect there are false dichotomies here. A user need not take full responsibility for their personal server/instance on the federation for them to truly own their data and presence. They only need to own a discrete component in the network that is easily moved and that contains their own personal information and identity. This component could just as easily be hosted on a large cloud service as it could on a bedroom Raspberry Pi, and, if truly nomadic, moved from being on one and then the other as is necessary.
It seems to me that most architectural thinking on this point fails to consider anything other than the “hardware” or server, in more or less traditional network terms, when, it seems to me, the issues concern the presentation and address-ability and mobility of the user as a discrete object.
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Maybe there is an archive of that you could still find
Imagine if, in 100 years, there was a massive Carrington Event and most of the world’s data was destroyed. How would we piece our history back together?
“The aurora over the Rocky Mountains in the United States was so bright that the glow woke gold miners, who began preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning.”
Lol, this must’ve been hella confusing.
We would definitely lose some data but I’m guessing there’s a few hundred backups of Wikipedia and the important stuff floating around.
A huge solar storm could wipe out the backups too unless they’re stored in a deep vault or something.
Solar storms arent really a risk for small electronics, more so if they aren’t connected to the grid. You wouldn’t need a deep vault, more like a cupboard.
There is a risk the hard drives wear out before society gets the grid back online and restarts producing hard drives though. We already don’t have that many facilities and they would certainly be taken offline, and the knowledge to build those facilities, that might get lost properly when the storm would hit.
“All things are made of atoms; little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.”
Someday historians will be reading all those emails our grandparents printed looking for cultural context.
Super interesting read, thanks for posting. (Pls don’t delete my comment)
