Data loss: digital dark ages A few days ago i was taking a look at WindowMaker[1] themes (the NeXTSTEP like windows manager). Usually searching for images gives you a faster feedback on the results you want, and there they were, all the themes that FreshMeat[2] used to have. Freshmeat was the place to get news on FLOSS, Linux, UNIXes, libre culture, everything. Its search features were fantastic. Narrow down results by language, platform, license type, everything really. Projects had reviews, discussions, emacs vs vim flamefests (a initiation ritual almost as old as UNIX itself) and themes to beautify your favourite window manager (or desktops), mostly from themes.org[3]. Themes.org was acquired and became part of freshmeat. Suddenly out of the blue, without warning, the entire themes section disappeared from the website. All those crazy, preposterous and kitsch WM, blackbox themes, GkrellM and XMMS skins with the obligatory Matrix backgrounds, vanished. Perhaps that was the reason. Back in the 90s everyone had a screenshot of Matrix as a desktop background, probably to the dismay of movie studios in their limitless short-sightedness. You can still find the images in archive.org but the archive itself hosts only a superficial layer of history. So, why would someone miss 4:3 aspect ratios SVGA themes for old-style (and lightweight) windows managers? The world moved on, and in most aspects it took several steps backwards. There's a vast piece of internet history, of cultural history even, that vanished and isn't stored anywhere. That alone is a loss. But it's not just the endless bits of information and culture that were at some point available and just vanished from the internet. There's a considerable amount of closed proprietary software that also vanished. There's no safe copy of the source code in a government library, a central repository that would try and balance the copyrights with the need to preserve cultural artefacts. Is software a cultural artefact? Data on public networks? Our over-infatuation with immediate gratification and fast consumption is slowly but inexorably paving the way for a digital dark age. But from bits into something more personal. At some point in life we need to go through the possessions of those that departed. Organize things. A bitter-sweet experience, more bitter than sweet, but necessary. Suddenly finding photos, yellowed black and white photos. Colour photos, some with reddish tones. You cannot stop thinking that in spite of all the imperfections: the film grain of the black and white emulsions, the chromogenic grain and reddish cast of unstable colour dies in colour photos or slides, and the blurriness and low resolving power of those lenses and film formats. That besides the haptic quality of a real photo, there's something timeless there. Precisely because it's imperfect perhaps. Perusing through items you find some velvet clad booklet like cases, and inside, tintypes[4] protected by velvet. The image is almost solarized[5]. You can only venture that the photos were taken in the XIX century but you know nothing about the people in the images and those that could tell you who they were are also long gone. But you have the images, letters, possessions, books. You know that family history is real, tangible. What are we going to leave to our children and grandchildren? Digital formats come and go. Although there are some standards, some software companies are notorious for their brazen attempts to subvert them and turn them into added-value proprietary offerings with all that it entails. Data on the networks is perhaps unsurprisingly fragile. Social networks come and go. Hi5, MySpace, Facebook.... Were they to vanish suddenly, close their doors, i wouldn't shed a tear. Civilization would be better for it without the frantic five minutes of hate and newspeak Orwell predicted, though he couldn't ever have imagined the medium. For the biggest part, it's a blessing that most of this data will vanish. Not everything is worth documenting. Still the fact remains: a vast part of the population use these networks and deposit their entire family history there, for better or worse. Leaving aside the implications of publishing your entire personal and family life on the internet for all to see, you're not guaranteed to have access to this data forever. You can be suspended, censored by political correctness, banned for having unpopular political opinions and so on, and loose access to all that. Even if you were to keep all that data in your platforms (mobile, tablet, et cetera) it's highly unlikely these technologies would still be functional after one hundred years. Bitrot, data loss, storage corruption, planned obsolescence, and inevitable decay. Are you sure someone will be able to access the photos in your mobile one hundred or so years from now? What are you leaving behind for your family? Will your great grandchildren know your face? Or will they be browsing some archive website in the hope of finding something, anything about you, only to find the archives are superficial at least, or that copyrights and intellectual property laws kept some information behind locked doors forever or worse, discarded it? That the image formats are not supported. The storage is corrupt, behind repair? Some of us might have a desk, box, closet, with our most private family possessions. There's nothing for the future generations. Nothing tangible, literally tangible. Your family history is in the cloud. Our culture is in the cloud. Links on the world wide web: [1] https://www.windowmaker.org/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freecode [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20000302210343/http://www.themes.org/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintype [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabattier_effect