Hard Drives in the Sky
The sky is the not the limit in the cloud.
"Some Flickr users who view the service as essentially a giant free hard drive in the sky may be unhappy with these changes, but MacAskill is okay with that. “I view Flickr as a community, not as a cloud-backup solution." https://medium.com/fast-company/flickrs-new-free-offering-is-better-than-amazing-it-s-sustainable-287c18cd1b2c
In 1998, Stewart Brand wrote an essay titled Written on the Wind so as to be forward-thinking about archiving the internet. The Long Now is already starting to show: What it may mean is that the permanence by which we associate the internet, is also subject to entropy. As it turns out, we don't have to save everything as a shield against a loss of memory. What's better is an ongoing mindful curation of what to keep ("exercising" the data). But it's not easy to simply adopt a new way of thinking about storage on a network, as link-rot will begin to happen. As the internet ages, it will perhaps have lots more "missing teeth."
We saved everything because we should--then saved everything because we could. Now we realize we don't necessarily have to--and perhaps shouldn't.
 |
| Early writing tablet recording the allocation of beer in southern Iraq, 3100–3000 BC |
"Some Flickr users who view the service as essentially a giant free hard drive in the sky may be unhappy with these changes, but MacAskill is okay with that. “I view Flickr as a community, not as a cloud-backup solution." https://medium.com/fast-company/flickrs-new-free-offering-is-better-than-amazing-it-s-sustainable-287c18cd1b2c
In 1998, Stewart Brand wrote an essay titled Written on the Wind so as to be forward-thinking about archiving the internet. The Long Now is already starting to show: What it may mean is that the permanence by which we associate the internet, is also subject to entropy. As it turns out, we don't have to save everything as a shield against a loss of memory. What's better is an ongoing mindful curation of what to keep ("exercising" the data). But it's not easy to simply adopt a new way of thinking about storage on a network, as link-rot will begin to happen. As the internet ages, it will perhaps have lots more "missing teeth."
We saved everything because we should--then saved everything because we could. Now we realize we don't necessarily have to--and perhaps shouldn't.
Comments