Even an end has a start

[bodlon]

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

Comments

[sanginmychains]

Dude, you know I normally respect your mind and your powers of reason. So it's with all affection, and the firm hope that you're just having a bad day when I say this: this is all paranoid, illogical bullshit. The idea that it's possible for humanity as a whole to experience some sort of collapse so bad that we'd actually lose all knowledge of technology past the 1840s is ludicrous. It certainly wouldn't be the end of oil that does it. Maybe one of those species collapses that they think happened only one time to humanity, back when we were still cave persons, when they think the species dwindled to just a few hundred organisms. But the end of oil? Honestly, there's no one (reasonable) who doesn't know it's coming, which means that tons of work is already being done to make the shift when it comes time.

And, long view, big shifts haven't so much happened to humanity as they have happened to civilizations. During the Dark Ages, maybe the Europeans weren't doing so well, but China and the Middle East were doing just fine. There was a time when the Mediterranean was just fledging, but the Aztecs had a pretty cool sewage and governance system. (I hope I have those crossover points right there...my knowledge of History is admittedly lacking in several details.)

Back away from the crazy section of the Internet. Or, if you want a kick, find web pages that talk about the whole collapse of civilization that was supposed to occur with Y2K. Ah, Y2K. Good times. I kept myself up until the wee hours, one night in 1999, freaking out after some ill-advised listening to an AM radio talk show about Y2K. There might actually be a rather embarrassing diary entry to back that one up.

[bodlon]

It's a testament to the sheer insanity of August that I'm replying to you two weeks later. Criminy.

I do not rule out the crazed bullshit angle. I'm not buying in so much as my brain latched onto the concept hard for a couple of weeks in a "what would this even look like?" way.

It's a bit like any other giant conspiracy theory: how on earth would such a thing actually remain in concealment?

(Granted, the banking crash that's brought on the last couple of years of recession seems like it would fit that bill as well, and global climate change isn't getting a lot of play in the industrialized world, but I like to assume that anything this big would actually get somebody's attention. Er.)

But yeah. Mainly I've been in Thought Experimentsville more than Holy Crap World Is Endingsville if that helps put your mind at ease. :)

[sanginmychains]

It does. And on reflection I did recognize the fingerprints of, well, reflection in your entry. That said, there are quite a lot of otherwise intelligent, rational, balance people who *do* swallow all kinds of emotion-triggering ideas like End of the World (in all its forms), so, you never know.

I'm glad you replied. There's a sort of taking-the-piss while discussing an intellectual difference of views that friends can get away with, but I wasn't sure whether a) the tone came across the Internet correctly or b) you were the sort of friend who would be okay with that. So I was actually stressing a bit over the silence.

Slightly related to this, the husband and I have decided that we're going to throw an Apocalypse party this New Years (to ring in 2012, of course). We're inviting people to come dressed as any figure from any apocalypse, fictional or missed or future. He'll be Nostradamus (we may have several of those). Maybe we'll get a The Mayor, and anyone dressed as a Mayan is acceptable. It's been 8 years since I threw a party, but really, the opportunity is too good to pass up.

[bodlon]

That's an excellent party idea. Though, technically, the best date for it might even be on the Winter Solstice of 2012, since that's when the calendar is supposed to end.

(What?! I know these things!)

But no, really! It's fine. I maintain a certain sort of what-if in general just because that's how my mind works, but I tend to have a pretty good sense of where idiosyncrasy starts and credulity begins.

Sorry I left you to stress. It's just been a thing, making time to catch up on the stuff that isn't on fire. :)