For in that blue screen of death what dreams may come :(

Questions and ramblings about archiving, digital vulnerability, and the future.

“For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—”
—Hamlet

I’ve been thinking about the “blue screen of death,” the one that caused complete chaos a few weeks ago when about 8.5 million devices worldwide became completely useless due to a faulty update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike. The outage affected airlines, hospitals, banks, businesses, and even disconnected some emergency phone lines. Delta airlines couldn’t get its shit together for days and now they’re being investigated.

The dreaded “blue screen of death”

When a social media platform goes down—even for a few minutes—thousands of posts flood other platforms “Is [platform] down?”

We have become so digital, and so trusting, that we don’t have backup protocols, options, or any way to do business without computers… without modern technology. As the generations born into tech grow up, analog record-keeping, manual archives, even physical libraries, will simply be a distant memory of the “olden times.”

The CrowdStrike fiasco showed us how interconnected our data systems and digital devices are, which is a vulnerability. Everything exists in some sort of ethereal cloud. A cloud that we all trust with our most precious memories and information, offered up without a second thought. I’m not claiming to know exactly how this technology works, and I’m sure there are myriad security protocols and such, but what I DO know is that sometimes it seems like we are one dingbat’s unplugging-of-the-wrong-wire away from disaster. Oops!

Your entire business’s software could go down at any time, and everything could be temporarily—or permanently 😬—lost. For small businesses, even one day of lost income could be catastrophic.¹

Imagine losing access to all of your photos and videos of your family, children, loved ones, pets, or important trips and memories?

Imagine losing all of your personal data to thieves—oh wait—that’s already happened.

I wonder how many businesses backup their databases² or how many families archive their digital information regularly?³ I would guess not very many, especially when we assume everything is safe in “the cloud.”

Since watching Leave the World Behind, I wonder if we depend too much on technology without any backup (the answer is yes, yes we do).⁴ The world operated for a long time without computers, Bluetooth, wiFi, and smartphones, and so why are we so quick to drop all other ways of doing things and assume everything is going to be protected? Respected? Archived? Better?

Recently, MTV News was shut down (😢) and its archives were taken down.⁵ Thanks to the nonprofit Internet Archive for stepping in and saving them! How are we to document and prove things happened in the past without an archive? If all of our news is practically digital, how are archivists of the future supposed to locate information about what happened during these times? Historians and archaeologists will have to also become technologists digging for data… archaetechnologists…technarchaeologists?⁶

I think about the content of the Internet being as important to history today as the Library of Alexandria was to the ancient world, and this includes social posts (who is archiving those? Elon Musk 🤣 Do you trust Meta to do it? Answer: it’s YOU! You should back your posts up!).

We think of social posts as ephemeral because they are short and quick and easy to scroll past, but they are so critical to our discourse. How else can we expect future generations to understand the role social media has played in our history? Even memes are part of our historical narrative; I think mainstream memes are the folk art of today (let’s hope Know your Meme can stand the test of time, they are the folk art museum of tomorrow).⁷

Not every website archives its content, and I can’t imagine what happens to archives when media websites exchange hands and new leaders make big changes. As we saw with MTV News, it could all be lost and there might not be an Internet Archive to save it.

A story I read a few weeks ago was about an AI reboot of a long-defunct site The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW). New owners zombified the old website with AI writers and content, trying to (I guess) capitalize on SEO. This was discovered because they neglected to change some of the original author names! They didn’t own the original content, only the domain, but figured no one would notice if they tried to clone it with “new” AI garbage (aka “slop”)?

This incident isn’t unique - this past month, WIRED published a story about numerous dead weeklies promoting OnlyFans disguised as editorial.

Not only could this happen to any defunct domain, but if that domain’s contents weren’t backed up anywhere, a domain sale could wipe out years and years of hard work, news, archives, bylines… in a split second. It’s another big case for always backing up your work. Ideally, you should own your content, subscribers, and domain so you have the ability to take it all with you.

All technology is ephemeral in the greater picture. Folks talk about the blockchain being this permanent, immutable thing, but what happens when we no longer use the technology that allows you to open and view a JPG? Also, if your actual content (such as a JPG) is not on-chain and points to another location (such as IPFS), there’s no guarantee that second or third party site is still in operation. Many web3 companies and NFT marketplaces have already come and gone, so how do we ensure our content (and proof of ownership) doesn’t disappear along with them? And what if we move away from electricity toward a different source of power, or don’t end up using the blockchain for anything at all anymore? What if we can no longer power the machines?

It seems bananas to think computers or electricity or some type of hardware or software might become defunct quickly, but we’ve only been using personal computers for a very short period of time. In approximately 30 years, they’ve gone from clunky boxes to pocket-sized.

In your house right now, do you have a way to play an 8-track? A record? A cassette? A video cassette? A CD? A DVD, even? I bet most people (musicians aside) haven’t even bought a single MP3 in at least a year, maybe longer. What makes you think that you’ll be able to plug in an old iPod, a USB, or even a USB-C into your computer in 15 years? We may not even be using wall plugs at that point.

We pretend our current technologies aren’t going away. Maybe they won’t in our lifetime, but we can assume more technological leaps are coming with each generation. Almost all technological hardware eventually becomes defunct. And in the age of artificial intelligence things are going to turn over much faster.

I am not writing this to be alarmist, only to ask questions and ponder how we’re digitally and physically archiving, and how we can guarantee accessibility of these archives for future generations.

There’s a bigger, more macro philosophical debate here of whether we need to archive anything. Does it really matter? Who will care? There’s already too much information garbage out there, so how could we even keep it all if we wanted to?

In the grand scheme of things, humans are in our infancy and if we continue to evolve for millions of years, ultimately we will cycle out of everything anyway. The oldest known cave painting is only about 64,000 years old, and we don’t know much about the 236,000 years prior that modern Homo sapiens were in existence, let alone the millions of years before that when our upright ancestors roamed the earth.

How will we be remembered when we’re gone, and do we even care?

Let’s end on a positive note with this fun story:

A woman named Marion Stokes took it upon herself to record about 35 years worth of broadcast news and television between the years of 1977 and 2012.

The good folks at Internet Archive have a few digital galleries you can peruse with a selection of her guerrilla archives. There is also a documentary (which I have yet to watch) and a book of images. I find people like this so fascinating.

Does anyone archive their work in hard copy form?

Do you create photo books?

Do you know of any other great examples of archived Internet content or guerrilla archivists?

Please share!

1. Of course, there’s insurance for these things but data is not like a TV—you can’t just go out and buy a new one.

2. Even if the companies keep up their end of the bargain, there is no guarantee you won’t get hacked.

3. I do a digital backup of individual folders, as well as a full Time Machine backup monthly on a separate drive, but I’m working on backing up all of my writing in physical form, too. I scanned all of my physical photos many years ago, getting rid of them thinking digital was the future, but now I’m worried I won’t be able to view them in 20 years.

4. I think this dependency is only going to increase with more electric vehicles and battery-powered devices. Hurry up, nuclear fusion!

5. Thank goodness for the Wayback Machine!

6. They’ll mostly be unearthing single-use plastics anyway. 🫤

7. For a great post on memes, check out this exceprt of Isabella Haid’s Exposed Nerves and Archival Impulses.