LIVING DATA STORAGE

How do you permanently store data that absolutely nobody cares 
about? I don't mean just for a year or two, but for generations. In 
a way it's a silly question because if nobody cares about it then 
nobody will want to retreive it. The premise I'm thinking of is 
that the information is secret, and nobody cares because nobody 
knows it exists, though there are more obvious solutions in that 
situation than the one I've got in mind.

What if someone, or some group, encoded information into a human 
society itself? Someone with the power to manipulate in some exact 
way the information that it values. At an immediate level it could 
be things like fashions and phrases. It could also be information 
that's valued historically, like the music charts, or sales records 
for art works. Things which aren't independently all that 
important, and therefore are open to influence, yet are valued 
highly within society so that people will continuously expend 
energy to preserve them for as long as physically possible, valuing 
them as the foundation for their own way of life.

The amount of data so encoded would have to be very small, and 
there's a definate question as to how such an effort would benefit 
anyone. I think this idea might mainly be of value in science 
fiction, where by some dubious narrative it makes sense for a being 
from space to imprint some data upon humanity. In fact the idea has 
probably already been taken, given how many science fiction writers 
are out there trying to think up something new.

Another angle is the idea that one could engineer an organism for 
this purpose, where its decendents learn particular actions which 
can be subtly manipulated to store data. The living data therefore 
maintains itself indefinately so long as the environment remains 
habitable by its carrier organism. This assumes that customising 
the genetic information of the organism itself to store the data 
isn't practical. Presumably it would be more efficient to create 
just one type of organism which can later be uniquely 'programmed' 
by some artificial method and pass that infomation on through 
the generations by its own actions.

 - The Free Thinker, 2021.