Memories Fade. Archives Burn. All Signal Eventually Becomes Noise

Column When moving house a few months back I found several heavy plastic tubs that, upon inspection, I saw contained my life's work in print. They were full of articles, magazines, books and book chapters.

That informal archive represents only a small portion of my total output. I've been writing on and for the web pretty much since it came into existence outside of CERN, so have more than 30 years' worth of material online.

Those plastic tubs are therefore a proverbial iceberg that represent perhaps a tenth of my output, the rest of which is submerged on networks.

I had wanted to write about how to make our invisible digital lives more visible; then two horrible events – one personal, the other of global significance – reset my compass.

Earlier this month I lost my good friend Tony Kastanos to lung cancer. I'd always known him as an artist – musician, painter, provocateur – but it wasn't until he was gone that I learned from his collaborators that he'd also released three albums of electronic music, produced with collaborator Tim Gruchy, who showed me how to find it on iTunes and Spotify.

I'd known Tony for two decades, but he'd never told me about his electronica work. Nor had he told me about his award-winning stop-motion video animation, Amerika Amerika.

Tim wondered aloud how to ensure that their collaborations would continue to be available. It's an essential question confronting any creative talent working in the digital era: How do we continue to offer our contributions to the generations that follow, when we're no longer around to spruik them?

The Internet Archive has a pivotal role to play here – not just because of its immunity to the commercial mutability of a Spotify or an Apple Music, but because its very existence and name imply a promise to maintain a long-term archive of all online creative works. Tim – and all of Tony's other collaborators – could be putting copies of all their works into a Tony-Kastanos-archive-within-The-Archive. If that happens, my friend won't disappear completely.

Half an hour after I'd learned of Tony's passing, a friend in Los Angeles sent me a long, harrowing text message expressing fear the fires battering the city could claim their home.

A week later, they were relieved to find their home intact – but many others did not.

Within a few days, a story began to circulate about one of the structures that did not survive: The building housing the archive of the Theosophical Society.

A century ago, Theosophists stood at the forefront of what today we'd call the "New Age" movement. Although the society's star has dimmed in the decades since, their influence on religion, philosophy and culture remains profound. Their archive housed most the papers and correspondence of the founders and main movers of the Theosophical Society – its genesis and history.

It's all gone now.

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To my knowledge, archivists for the Theosophical Society had made little effort to preserve their archives in digital form. Nearly everything within the physical archive is likely now lost, because no one had foreseen the need to make a backup copy.

We all face oblivion: All the works of humanity will be overwhelmed by entropy, even when we print them upon fancy digital microfiche, commit to "century-scale storage" or beam them at the stars.

All signal eventually becomes noise.

Is that a bad thing? Only when oblivion comes prematurely – and could have been prevented. Tim O'Reilly summed it up well, when he said: "The greatest threat to the artist isn't piracy – it's obscurity."

A wise post on Mastodon points out how we can rage against oblivion: "...you don't preserve digital media by stuffing the One True Version in an #archive. Make countless copies and scatter them to the wind. Make each a different format. You don't know which of them will still be readable next decade, so don't try to guess. That goes for analog media too. The Library of Alexandria contained copies. Many classic paintings only survived as copies. Copying is how life itself beats death. Embrace it."

Those plastic tubs now serve another purpose: a reminder that I need to find better digital archives ... and a photocopier. ®