A tip o’ the hat to Eric W. for bringing this to my attention: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/06/the-internet-is-a-collective-hallucination/619320/
If, at some point in the next decade or two, you find this blog post and click the link above, there is about a 50/50 chance that the link will take you back to the actual Atlantic article. If so, great. Read it. It’s good. If it doesn’t take you back to the article, well… that’s the point of the article. “Link rot,” also known as the inability of the Internet to provide stable and reliable access to historical information, is a problem. And it’s growing.
So, do you want the good news or the bad news first?
Bad, you say? Ok. Here it is: we’re fucked.
The good news? We’ll probably be fucked relatively quickly. How’s that for a cheery upside?
In a sentence, here’s the problem: we’re drowning in informational shit.
Let me explain.
Prior to the advent of scratching symbols on slates of clay and training up a priesthood of folks who knew what those symbols meant, human knowledge was transferred from one generation to the next through the oral tradition. Song, poetry, storytelling… those were the vehicles that passed along information. Not just any information, however. There are only so many hours in a day (or a lifetime) to recite poetry, sharing accumulated knowledge about the importance of observed weather patterns or wildlife migrations, and so on. The additional hurdle was that the younger generation needed to commit those details to memory. This had a couple implications for the inter-generational flow of information. The most important, in my view, is that the important shit had to be really important shit. The passing of information about how a culture sustains itself (with the goal being as little change and “disruption” as possible) couldn’t be a willy-nilly thing but a task that took time, care, curation and attention. The ancillary benefit of keeping change to a minimum also, as it turns out, increases the efficiency of generational transfer of knowledge. If my great-grandmother and grandmother and mother are all telling me the same thing about the best way to continue my culture, it becomes “stickier.”
Once human societies moved from pre-agriculture to agriculture-based societies, we needed to start keeping a written record of who owned what and who owed whom what. Hyper-specialization got a nose under the flap of the tent and specialized bodies of knowledge about such things as dog breeding, dog grooming, canine veterinary care, dog leash laws, dog nuisance laws, codified programs to reduce the load of dog feces in our urban stormwater systems, etc., all had to be written down. All of it. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The fact that I can sit on my porch and type these thoughts about the shortcomings of the written word on a laptop that magically sends signals over the fucking air to some box in my basement that then shuttles it onto the Internet is all thanks to the power of the written word.
But… the moment I press the “Publish” button when I’m done with this post, I will have added my bit of weight to the roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes per day of data that humans (and our machines) are creating. Being a helpful guy, I looked it up for you: there are 18 zeros in a quintillion. Tonight there is more data and information to manage, collect, sort and store than there was this morning. And who is keeping track of it? Everyone. And no one. But more importantly, no one is in charge of curating, collecting, storing and reliably retrieving the important shit.
Let’s go back to those clay tablets for a moment. A profession sprang up (yes, a specialized profession) to dutifully catalog, safely store and predictably retrieve those tablets. But those tablets themselves? Damn, they were expensive to produce, laborious to write on, heavy to carry around, not so easy to store, difficult to duplicate, you could only take one at a time with you to the bathroom, and a whole long list of other drawbacks. So while such things as clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, illuminated manuscripts inked on vellum, and other such media vastly expanded the ability of humans to capture and pass down information, it still had to be pretty damn important stuff (at least in some minds) before it would be committed to preservation.
The printing press, bless Gutenberg’s soul, may be the closest corollary to our current crisis. Gutenberg blew shit up. And kudos to him. He (and his press) took what had been almost exclusively the realm of the church and academia and pushed it out to the masses. Kudos again. Gutenberg created a boom in the information management industrial complex, from which I continue to benefit. Libraries and librarians sprang into action, doing what we do best: cataloging, storing and retrieving valuable stuff. And there was more valuable stuff than ever before. Things were booming.
The Gutenberg analogy to the modern day boom of information production holds true on many fronts: we librarians are currently flopping around in quintillions of bytes of daily data, with centuries of work ahead of us to wrangle and impose some order on the mess. Just as the crush of books gave rise to new technologies to make the information useful (hugs, Mr. Dewey), there are any number of tools that current-day libraries and librarians are using to tame the electronic data beast.
But back to the bad news: we’re fucked.
Why? Because of ownership. In the era of print-based publication and dissemination, libraries could act as curators to identify, catalog, and store the valuable shit. This had some obvious downsides. If the librarian making the selection decisions had a bias for “valuable” that discredited marginalized and colonized communities, there was real and lasting harm in those decisions. Setting those issues aside for the time being, libraries were able to purchase and own their collections. And that’s the crux of the situation we find ourselves in today.
With libraries increasingly relying on access rather than ownership, the curation bit of the equation has been drastically broadened (hooray, a good thing, by and large) but the storage and reliable retrieval process has been left to market forces. The invisible hand. And as it turns out, an invisible hand job is not as great as one might imagine it to be. Case in point: it wasn’t until 2014 that all “big five” American publishers even allowed public libraries to purchase (and catalog and store and retrieve) their e-books. We could “lease” them but ownership wasn’t on the table. Fuckery, nicely summed up by this piece from the Washington Post.
While there are efforts underway to capture, archive and reliably retrieve wide swaths of the internet (see also: https://archive.org), libraries — and those we serve — will continue to struggle if our traditional role of curation, storage and reliable retrieval is whittled down to just retrieval. We can’t reliably retrieve what we don’t own. And if we don’t own it, we haven’t curated it. And if we haven’t curated it, we haven’t had the chance to try keep just the important shit. Sooo, yeah… here we are.
Knowing all of this, I hereby move that this blog post be printed, bound, cataloged and entered into the permanent collection at the United States of ‘Murica’s Library of Congress. It shall be shelved under the official Library of Congress Subject Heading of “Shit, important”.
ReMarkable 