Digital Death

Ted Rall has written a very interesting article on the problem of long-term loss of digital data, and how our modern technological trend towards digital storage of all sorts is going to have unanticipated consequences.

"Without discussion or debate humanity has committed itself to the wholesale digitalization of its collective cultural and historical information base. Music, movies, manuscripts, everything from letters between presidents to merchants' financial transactions are currently created and stored in strictly digital form--a development that fulfills George Orwell's prophecy that history would become mutable, now with a few keystrokes. Even more terrifying than the likelihood that the digitalization of history will be abused in the service of tyranny is the certainty that we are setting the stage for the greatest loss of knowledge since the destruction of the Royal Library at Alexandria."

He goes on to talk about how data is increasingly stored in digital formats that are soon rendered obsolete:

"Data is created in a bewildering variety of programs, even within the same type of application (say, word processing). Few are interchangeable, differing operating systems conflict within the same program, and they go out of date with alarming speed. Files created in WordPerfect, until fairly recently the nation's dominant word processing program, are quickly becoming as irretrievable as ragtime songs recorded on brown wax phonograph cylinders. It is conceivable that a few librarians will keep around some antique Wangs and Commodore 64s in order to access digital archives. And a tiny proportion of data will be transferred and adapted to successor formats. But for most computer users, data created on obsolete software and hardware might as well have never existed."

And he discusses how even our modern forms of digital data storage media, the magnetic Zip drives and their equivalent, and the optical CDs and DVDs, suffer degradation and decay with time. Most importantly, once decay reaches a certain extent all data stored on that device is lost, unlike on say a photograph or a piece of paper which, even though degraded, can still be seen or read to one extent or another.

This is a pretty interesting topic, especially as it's something my wife and I were discussing just the other day, in regards to digitally stored photographs. We discussed how many uncountable photos that out there, many of which surely of great sentimental value to their owners, are probably stored in formats for which there will be no programs to read in 5 or 10 years. Even home-printing of photographs, which has become so popular as of late, has an achilles heel in that photos produced by lower quality printers at home will almost certainly degrade beyond viewing within only a matter of decades. In other words, you can't count on showing your grandkids photos of grandma in her wedding dress 50 years from now if you printed those photos out on the printer you bought at Best Buy.

Obviously, the digital storage of data is an unstoppable trend. It's more efficient, more flexible and more cost-effective then storing data on reams of bulky paper, and that trend, coupled with the internet, is what puts so much data at the fingertips of so many people these days. But the plain fact is it does come with a downside, that there's no real way to preserve that data such that we can almost guarantee that someone 100 or 200 or 1000 years from now is going to be able to access it. In fact, there's really no way right now to guarantee that we'll be able to access it ourselves later in our lives; I certainly can't run old programs saved to floppy disks(the original floppy disks) that I wrote on an old Apple computer back in 1985, whatever sentimental value they might have to me. Will I even be able to read any of these blog entries in 2020?

Gregory Benford, the award-winning sci-fi writer and physicists, addresses this problem from another angle in his book Deep Time, which is all about how we modern humans will manage to communicate our descendents living thousands of years from now. In it he discusses how he and other prominent scientists were enlisted by the federal government to work on the problem of communicating the danger of the Yucca nuclear waste site-filled with radioactive nuclear waste that would still be deadly 50,000 years from now-to future generations. The scientists also confronted the problem of digital data storage, in that any warning saved on a computer or a device meant to be read by a computer, might be incompatible with future technology.

Certainly we've made a fundamental shift, from historical records stored on papyrus, to everyday financial and personal records stored on personal computers, CDs, or on the internet. How will we preserve this data? Maybe technology will give us the solution for that problem eventually as well.