I’ve felt much the same way for decades. I am very grateful that all the stupid shit I thought, did, or said as a young person wasn’t preserved by some omnipresent archival machine. Some moments are best lost to the winds of time. People who grew up with the internet and social media don’t know what life was like before. I’m not a “good old days” kind of guy, but I do think the archive-everything-forever compulsion does vast amounts of harm.
You probably responded before I made my edit, but do you remember how 14 years ago there was actually a lot of worry about how things on the internet would be around forever and how that would change society?
Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story “Funes, the Memorious,” describes a young man who, as a result of a riding accident, has lost his ability to forget. Funes has a tremendous memory, but he is so lost in the details of everything he knows that he is unable to convert the information into knowledge and unable, as a result, to grow in wisdom. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, in “Delete,” uses the Borges story as an emblem for the personal and social costs of being so shackled by our digital past that we are unable to evolve and learn from our mistakes. After reviewing the various possible legal solutions to this problem, Mayer-Schönberger says he is more convinced by a technological fix: namely, mimicking human forgetting with built-in expiration dates for data. He imagines a world in which digital-storage devices could be programmed to delete photos or blog posts or other data that have reached their expiration dates, and he suggests that users could be prompted to select an expiration date before saving any data.
Because it’s interesting that now the other side of the coin seems to be the primary concern. Previously we were considering expiration dates on data and deep user control. Now the attitude seems to be the opposite, that it shouldn’t be up to the user, but up to the archivist.
Thanks for sharing this, it’s a fascinating take. I am certainly not against archiving things that are worth archiving. And I am not qualified to know who should or should not have the authority to make such a determination when it comes to “historical things”. But I do believe that individual people (who are not public figures in positions of power / accountability) should always have the option to be forgotten if they choose to be. I am average person of no particular historical interest or merit, I don’t really need an expert to tell me that. If I want my shit deleted at any time, and especially after I die, that should be my right. However, “ownership” can get very murky when we sign EULAs and are talking about the costs of hosting, etc. So there are “overriding factors” that may occur, too. Those should never be deceptive or misleading. But of course, they often are. They hide a lot of evil assertions in boring legalese. Google lets you delete your digital data with them if they detect no activity within a time-frame you set. If they are not full of BS and actually honor this, I think that’s pretty cool. The compulsion to archive everything is really just data hoarding. Not that different from people who live in a home surrounded by clutter they never use.
I’ve felt much the same way for decades. I am very grateful that all the stupid shit I thought, did, or said as a young person wasn’t preserved by some omnipresent archival machine. Some moments are best lost to the winds of time. People who grew up with the internet and social media don’t know what life was like before. I’m not a “good old days” kind of guy, but I do think the archive-everything-forever compulsion does vast amounts of harm.
You probably responded before I made my edit, but do you remember how 14 years ago there was actually a lot of worry about how things on the internet would be around forever and how that would change society?
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html
Because it’s interesting that now the other side of the coin seems to be the primary concern. Previously we were considering expiration dates on data and deep user control. Now the attitude seems to be the opposite, that it shouldn’t be up to the user, but up to the archivist.
Thanks for sharing this, it’s a fascinating take. I am certainly not against archiving things that are worth archiving. And I am not qualified to know who should or should not have the authority to make such a determination when it comes to “historical things”. But I do believe that individual people (who are not public figures in positions of power / accountability) should always have the option to be forgotten if they choose to be. I am average person of no particular historical interest or merit, I don’t really need an expert to tell me that. If I want my shit deleted at any time, and especially after I die, that should be my right. However, “ownership” can get very murky when we sign EULAs and are talking about the costs of hosting, etc. So there are “overriding factors” that may occur, too. Those should never be deceptive or misleading. But of course, they often are. They hide a lot of evil assertions in boring legalese. Google lets you delete your digital data with them if they detect no activity within a time-frame you set. If they are not full of BS and actually honor this, I think that’s pretty cool. The compulsion to archive everything is really just data hoarding. Not that different from people who live in a home surrounded by clutter they never use.