bodlon | Even an end has a start (Reply)

A few days ago, I caught a link to this post about the end of digital preservation as a result of a possible future oil crash.

The main thrust is this: According to the author's chosen data, oil discovery and extraction will "peak" and then decline rapidly as diminishing supply and reserves are used up. Because digital preservation relies on fossil fuels (primarily oil) for energy, as well as for raw materials to create storage media and the machines that use that media, digital preservation (along with what is almost certainly a significant portion of the industrialized world's material culture and infrastructure) will cease to be something we can maintain by around 2037-ish.

(Necessary disclaimer: I'm aware of criticisms of peak oil theory which say this analysis doesn't account for non-traditional sources like oil sands or oil shale, which companies say could provide power for 100 years or more. Still, there are serious concerns surrounding the environmental impact involved with these extraction techniques. All of my knowledge, though, is layman's knowledge. I'm not a geologist, and I can't predict what long-term issues my generation or our descendants are going to face in terms of global energy crises. I am, however, really great at banging my head against ideas until words come out.)

2037 seems like one of those slightly impossible science-fiction dates to me, so it was a bit staggering for me to realize that it's 26 years away. It's not unreasonable for me to hope I'll live another 26 years. I know that I'd certainly like to.

I also really like digital storage, retrieval, and preservation. A compact disc is perhaps less safe in my hands than files in electronic format are. These days, I almost never buy music on tangible media anymore. It's an inconvenience to add it to iTunes, and I don't currently have a good place to store my discs. To say that my physical music collection is in a state of disarray would be putting it very gently indeed.

Still, break the thing with those files on it (as I did by putting my iPod Nano through the wash this summer) or take away the electricity it takes to access them, and poof.

The scenario that the author describes is bigger than that.

Do we roll back to pre-Industrialization? Is there a massive paradigm shift coming in the next decade that will help resolve the issue? When are the benevolent aliens showing up? Should I start buying up land and building my big pagan art monastery now? Is 26 years long enough to learn how to sing and play all the songs I want to preserve? Do I need to build a loom? Had I better take those calligraphy courses now and learn to cut a quill so I can teach the kids to do that stuff when I'm sixty? And while I'm thinking about cutting quills, where's all the paper going to come from?

Behold my ability to freak out in the face of graphs and charts, tempered only slightly by the fact that I don't really know how this particular bit of USGS data fits in to the bigger picture. My skill at geology roughly starts and ends with identifying a few types of rocks and semi-precious stones, some of which I probably wouldn't recognize in the rough. I'm only slightly better at it than, say, thatching a roof.

(Do I need to learn to thatch a roof?)

The thing I keep coming back to is history. We're always living in history. I don't know that it's necessarily apparent to every member of every generation in its moment -- stories are full of villages where nothing ever changes -- but big shifts happen to humanity all the time. Empires rise and fall, ideas morph and change, technologies are discovered and lost.

That doesn't make the concrete prospect of the end of digital preservation (and really, everything that goes along with it) any more palatable, if it should happen. It does give one a framework in which to conceptualize the "what ifs," though. As someone who loves few things more than tinkering with that sort of thing, and making stories out of it, I find I'm able to transmute the genuine concern (and, let's be honest, actual fear) into something more manageable.

I can make art with this. I can learn skills that interest me with or without a global energy apocalypse. I can make small changes and support policies which could make bigger ones because even if the sky's not falling, more sustainable tools aren't exactly a bad aim in general.

If I get to spend my dotage in the awesome, glittering cities of the future instead of a drafty, post-apocalyptic hill fort, I'll be able to tell those children of the future crazy stories about that time our entire planet was on the brink of the dark ages, and how I learned a bunch of songs just in case.

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com