Impermanence

Physical things can hang around for a long, long time. You can keep them in your house, for example. Short of some epic disaster like a fire, it is up to you how long you value them and when you finally get rid of them. It is in your control. For some people, it is possible to keep their stuff safe for their entire life. It becomes an heirloom.

Digital things are impermanent. There are an endless number of ways for them to get lost, forgotten, or corrupted.

The next hardware you buy is probably only good for five years, maybe a little bit longer. Rolling over to newer hardware probably won’t go well, even if you spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure it out.

The cloud storage you pay for may be discontinued or out of business next week. They probably scrimped on backups, so odds are that in a disaster the stuff you wanted won’t make it. They’ll apologize, of course. And they are always working harder on finding ways to increase the price than they are on finding ways to make it more reliable, engineering is not as important as exploitation. You may wake up one day to a nasty price increase. Storing stuff on the cloud is extremely hazardous.

Compounding it all, software keeps changing. Most programmers suck at achieving any real sort of backward compatibility. They’ll just force you to wipe out everything because it was easier for them to code it that way. The chances that persistent data survives for longer than a decade are slim. And even if technically it did survive, it has probably become unreachable, unusable. The software you used before to leverage it has long since been broken by someone else who didn’t know or care about what you need.

There was a big stink about forgetting things on the web, but honestly, it was a total waste of time. Not only is the web tragically forgetful, but the infrastructure on the web is getting a little more useless every day. Technically stuff could still be out there, but how would you find it now? The web is about hype, not information. Stuff tends to vanish when the limelight gets shifted.

In the grand scheme of things, the digital realm is extraordinarily flakey. Far more of its history is lost than preserved. It’s a dangerous, somewhat unpredictable place where selfishness and irrationality have more weight than quality. The odds are better that someone else whom you don’t want to see your data will see it than you getting that same data back in twenty or thirty years. We make stuff digital to be trendy, not smart.