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In a cliché movie scene, an old man has just lost his wife. He goes through his archives, his wife’s lockers and finds an old photograph, picturing a happy moment from when their love was young and blossoming. A tear drops from the old man’s eyelids as he flips through photos he didn’t remember existing.
Let’s imagine the same situation in the year 2050. An old man has just lost his wife and wants to go through her archives. He opens her laptop and luckily guesses the password correctly. He knows she has kept her private diary and documents online, behind a secure password. The man tries to get through but can’t guess the password this time. Disappointed, he closes the laptop and turns to a pile of old CDs and DVDs from 50 years back. He becomes desperate: CD and DVD drives are a memory from the past, and the few ones that still are left, are held in museums, obviously not working anymore. Now all he has is a pile of plastic, holding his precious memories, and no way to access it.
As archeologists find hieroglyphs in ancient Egypt or pieces of clay in ancient Sumeria, they have their tactics in learning to understand the language they are written in. Thinking about the archeologists 3000 years forward, what do they learn from us, finding pieces of silicon in ruins of ancient San Francisco? What kind of ancient civilization will we be? The Digital Dark Age. It’s just a pile of silicon. No writing, no stories, no documents.
It’s not only a problem of the archeologists of the future. If I would be run over by a bus today, all my email, online accounts and many files would be inaccessible for eternity. Then I heard about Legacy Locker and signed up. The service promises to hold my online assets and pass them to my family (or whoever I choose) when I pass out. This really is an answer to our needs. What worries me is that since the Internet is in constant change of ever-growing speed, I doubt this service even exists anymore when it is needed in my case. I don’t have my old emails from 3 years back anymore, so let’s say I live for more 50 years, what will my family get? Passwords to services that haven’t been existing for generations? Not to say that probably the whole service will be long forgotten.
I am a huge fan of Long Now Foundation, an organization that aims to promote long-term thinking in this world where 10 years is enough to call something “ancient”. 15 years ago, I first connected myself to the Internet and already this very technology has changed our society in a radical way, with more changes to come. The same time passed between years 1034 and 1049 AD, one tenth of the time that passed between 2300 BC and 2150 BC. Still, we don’t feel there is any difference between these numbers. Even 4000 years is a very short time in Earth history: The sun is approximately of the same age even after 3 million years, but for us, 100 years is enough to make us dizzy. Year 2109 feels like being far in the future! We are the Homo Erectus of technology, and we need to understand that.
Long Now Foundation has many projects helping their cause, some more concrete and some based more on educating people. Along them, is Long Server and its Format Exchange project. In the project, the foundation is building a format library to prevent old file formats to be completely readable after they become obsolete. I really hope this foundation grabs the attention and critical mass it needs to survive the inevitable end of its core people’s limited life spans. I recommend checking also other projects of theirs, like Long Bets.
Oh, and don’t forget to leave something behind you! Luckily, I lived my childhood in the analogue age, so my first grade school material is still available, whenever I want to feel nostalgic. And when I ever will have children, I can imagine their faces when they see how backwards the life was in the early 90’s: paper and pens! Or maybe the archeologist of the year 5000 thinks we’re the backward ones, for not leaving a trace of our civilization?
Tags: digital dark age, future
