So, here’s something that’s been coming to mind of late, especially with the recent death of Leonard Nimoy.

Our digital lives varnish after our death. Oh, don’t get me wrong, they’ll last a little longer than our deaths — the server this blog is hosted on for example will stay running. However, it won’t get maintained, that’s what I do, so over time it’ll get hacked, or will break. My brother might take over maintaining it for a while, but in the end, the words and thoughts stored here (some hidden from public view) will vanish.

Archive.org is great, it’ll keep a copy of these words for posterity.. but who’ll ever read them?

I’m not sure if I’m morbid at the moment, or it’s just depression talking, but this all feels so.. transient. These words won’t have the lasting power of those stored on a book, in the end they’re stored on media that’ll die a lot faster than a book degrades, stored correctly. Not to mention, they’re stored in a particularly complex format, that isn’t human readable in any way without the right filter and conversions.

I guess, this is really just underlining the importance of Archive.org and their ilk. Not that I suppose anyone’ll care about what’s stored here.. much as the most read post here is my brother’s posts on linux beep music 😉
https://kirrus.co.uk/2010/09/linux-beep-music/