2019-10-28 - Ephemera, or the Consciousness of Forgetting --------------------------------------------------------- I've seen some discussion of the question of archiving the gopherverse. Solderpunk (as is their wont) wrote a lengthy and thoughtful piece [1] which I strongly recommend reading. (Incidentally, and as an aside - I've never heard of "the civil right" in this context, and I don't really understand the usage. Civil, from civilis, refers to society, and to public life. The concept of civil rights derives from that into the 1600s, and refers to those rights natural to people which are restrained only insofar as necessary for the public good. "The civil right", in that context, makes no sense to me) Some of the commentary on solderpunk's piece has shown, of course, divided opinion. There are those who claim that all statements made in public are, res ipsa loquitor, statements which become the property of the public. This claim is as nonsensical as it is legally ridiculous. By making a statement in a public place, I do not pass ownership of the content I have "performed" to anyone else, I retain that ownership, it is mine, noone elses. I may have chosen to permit a certain group of people to read it, or hear it; I may have restricted that audience in a number of ways, be it my followers on social media, or the small but highly-regarded phlog audience; I may have structured my comments to that audience, such as using jargon on a mailing list which, when quoted out of context, can appear to mean something quite different; I may just have posted a stupid or ill-judged photo to my friends. In each of those cases, it is specious to claim that I have given ownership of my posts to the public, forever, without hope of retrieval. It is not the case that I have surrendered my right to privacy, forever, to all 7.7bn inhabitants of this earth. To take an apposite and contemporary example - Katie Hill, when she consented to her husband taking intimate photos, did not consent, nor could she consent, to those photos being spread all over various websites, ending her political career. In much the same way, I reacted strongly when I realised that posts I had made on my phlog were appearing on *google* thanks to that site's indexing of gopher portals. I did not ever consent to content I made available over port 70 becoming the property of rapacious capitalists. I hold the same view regarding archiving of gopher sites. If confronted with such a putative archivist, I would state, in the simplest possible terms: "Who the hell made you the arbiter of this?" Sysdharma posits an archival tag for publication [2] a proposal that is not without merit. I think, however, that the most appropriate solution is to have a robots.txt file for each gopherhole, one which allows the content creator the right to say: "You can archive the posts in the folder marked public/, but that's all." The content creator, after all, is the *only* person who has the right to make that decision, they are the only one who knows the audience they are willing to share something with, and the only ones who are the arbiter of that. Does this mean that some things will be lost? Yes. Is this a price worth paying? Absolutely. We cannot repeat, again, the errors which led us to the modern web. We must not permit the same brigading, the same context-free quoting, the same mis- and dis-information which the web has facilitated. We can start doing that by protecting the rights of content creators. Content which is ephemeral is not lost. If it has caused a reaction within us, then it has served a greater purpose than a thousand thousand archives of everything which has ever been. When you read a phlog post or other post, remembering that it may be gone tomorrow does not impact your enjoyment of the post. If the post has meaning for you, then reach out to the creator, talk to them, perhaps they have more to say which may be as meaningful, or as important. For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only thought love -- Carl Sagan [1]: gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/the-individual-archivist-and-ghosts-of-gophers-past [2]: gopher://sdf.org/1/users/sysdharma/phlog/./2019.10.28