Here it is, the longest piece of nonfiction I’ve ever written, CENTURY-SCALE STORAGE. The kind folks at @harvardlil.bsky.social let me investigate the present and future of digital storage, and how we steward and preserve our most treasured cultural objects lil.law.harvard.edu/century-scal... - ThreadSky

maxy.bsky.social • 83 days ago

Here it is, the longest piece of nonfiction I’ve ever written, CENTURY-SCALE STORAGE. The kind folks at @harvardlil.bsky.social let me investigate the present and future of digital storage, and how we steward and preserve our most treasured cultural objects https://lil.law.harvard.edu/century-scale-storage/

Comments

robm.wtf•82 days ago

I absolutely loved this, thanks! Do you think a model would work whereby individuals commit an endowment that will cover storage costs in the long-term to an organisation whose charter mandates long-term stewardship, who then invest the money like a pension fund would and run an archive forever?

robm.wtf•82 days ago

Like say the cost to store 1TB of data is ~$60 a year, could I commit an amount of capital that would generate $60/year without touching the principal (so, like… $3k @ 2%), and then have indefinite storage of 1TB of data? I appreciate it's still contingent on technological and motivational issues!

robm.wtf•82 days ago

Then you run the org as an interesting non-profit that attracts and employs primarily technologists, archivists and librarians, plus some financial types to run the endowment and an independent supervisory board, etc.

maxy.bsky.social•82 days ago

thanks so much for reading! Yeah this is something I've been thinking about a lot. Endowment models are super interesting, and when I dream about founding things it's definitely a place my brain instinctively goes...

maxy.bsky.social•82 days ago

...but for the specific target in the piece it gets a little dicey as the economic and governmental paradigms/system an endowment is founded upon don't often last 100 years. Eventually a shock comes along. And in those cases, something like public ownership can have serious advantages

robm.wtf•82 days ago

Interesting! The parallel that leaps to mind is universities, where there are lots of examples of 500–1000-year lifespans and where they seem "default alive" rather than the default-dead of most private enterprises. Maybe it could be piggybacked onto some of them, spread across a few countries?

peterkaminski.wiki•77 days ago

@robm.wtf @maxy.bsky.social, check out Arweave:

https://arwiki.wiki/#/en/storage-endowment

("Data Permanence, Not Network Permanence" is esp. interesting)

Root of the wiki:

https://arwiki.wiki/

Here's my hello world post from 2022-11-25, let's check it again in 98 years (or 998, etc.)...

https://arweave.net/f9IHcqGS7tDXFS6r1gin1_ge9925Lziwc9nmjc7LKP0

peterkaminski.wiki•77 days ago

@robm.wtf @maxy.bsky.social PS, also check out Long Now, e.g., https://rosettaproject.org/ or https://longnow.org/clock/

Also https://deadmedia.org, although it's a little bit.... dead.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240306220302/http://www.deadmedia.org/notes/index-cat.html

maxy.bsky.social•83 days ago

It has crazy good design from friends Shelby Wilson and Alex Miller. If you like reading about libraries, archives, hard drives, codexes, monasteries, wars, disasters, space probes, and indictments of the current corporate and government order, this piece might be for you...

greenrat.bsky.social•83 days ago

📌

vegber.bsky.social•82 days ago

Amazing!

Immediately reminded me of this blog post, where they show how hard it is to read a file like it was meant to be read, although it's just a few decades old.

https://blog.jgc.org/2024/02/the-original-www-proposal-is-word-for.html?m=1

ronin-red.bsky.social•30 days ago

That reminds me of an article about the challenges in the field of nuclear energy.
In french : https://www.sfen.org/rgn/au-cea-et-a-lirsn-les-gardiens-de-la-memoire-du-nucleaire/

peterkraska.bsky.social•81 days ago

Great read! As someone working in the science data management field, it’s refreshing to see such a slick presentation of these concepts. 👍

maxy.bsky.social•81 days ago

aw thank you so much!

planecrazy.bsky.social•76 days ago

Fascinating article. As someone who began life in an analog world, and has worked extensively with both technology in a commercial setting, and in an academic and research setting, I am very interested in this topic. Great write up of the issues.

maxy.bsky.social•76 days ago

aw thank you!

planecrazy.bsky.social•76 days ago

It's particularly poignant to me as I have spent years now doing research that is unique. Granted, it's highly niche, but it is a (VERY) small addition to the corpus of human knowledge that is found nowhere else. Once I die, unless preserved, it dies too. https://thesteelpen.com

solarpsychedelic.bsky.social•83 days ago

📌

lipsticklacey.bsky.social•78 days ago

📌

chriscariot.bsky.social•83 days ago

📌

shannonmattern.bsky.social•78 days ago

Belated congratulations and thanks, Maxwell! This is amazing!

maxy.bsky.social•77 days ago

aw thank you Shannon! <3

evilpilaf.bsky.social•83 days ago

📌

spencer.place•83 days ago

beautiful and fascinating, congrats!!

atherton.bsky.social•83 days ago

!!!!!!!

notplants.bsky.social•82 days ago

appreciating the note about "print books" as a viable decentralized medium for long-term storage

notplants.bsky.social•82 days ago

especially with the possibility of re-digitizing and re-printing books, could imagine a system where books are stored via "printing and distributing" along with efforts to digitize and re-print "endangered" books, with texts oscillating between text and digital forms over millennia

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