Hacker Cinema
Digital Amnesia
2014 · Film · documentary · 50 min
Directed by Bregtje van der Haak
Focusing on the vulnerability of digital data, Digital Amnesia ponders the sustainability of modern artifacts that have no material state. Notable archivists share their perspectives on the Digital Age and whether it poses great promise or threat to the longevity of digital information and our collective memory.
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3 comments on Hacker News
My favorite quote of him that hits me every time I think of it:
"On the internet, it doesn't matter who you are or where you came from. Everyone is the same behind the keyboard."
(2014 Digital Amnesia documentary by VPRO)
Rest in peace, old friend.
In my opinion redundancy in a single business entity is no redundancy at all, especially if there's legal obligations of a soon-to-be-burning-books-again regime.
A better strategy would have been to found independent entities in other liberal democracies, so they can act as IP backups.
There was a great vpro documentary called "Digital Amnesia" [1] where they also interviewed the lead of the library of Alexandria, who was the only bidder to buy the national KIT library of the Netherlands and its dissolved inventory at the time.
Interviews with archivists, librarians, web archive and others on the topic. It's insane to see that nations don't want to preserve their history, science, and culture anymore.
But here we are.
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=NdZxI3nFVJs
Related documentary that comes to mind: Digital Amnesia (2014) [1]
It broke my heart seeing those librarians in disbelief when their national library was sold off to the highest bidder. When they said "It seems our country does not value our own culture anymore".
Books lasted hundreds of years. Good luck trying to read a floppy from the 90s, or even DVDs that are already beyond their lifetime and are a very recent medium.
It gets worse when you read the fine print of the SSD specifications, wherein they state that an SSD may lose all its data after 2 weeks without power, and data retention rates are at less than 99%, meaning they will degrade after the first year of use. And don't get me started on SMR HDDs, I lost enough drives already :D
Humanity has a backup problem. We surely live in Orwellian times because of it.
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=NdZxI3nFVJs