ted rall on data rot

[sophiaserpentia]

Without discussion or debate humanity has committed itself to the wholesale digitalization of its collective cultural and historical information base. Music, movies, manuscripts, everything from letters between presidents to merchants' financial transactions are currently created and stored in strictly digital form--a development that fulfills George Orwell's prophecy that history would become mutable, now with a few keystrokes. Even more terrifying than the likelihood that the digitalization of history will be abused in the service of tyranny is the certainty that we are setting the stage for the greatest loss of knowledge since the destruction of the Royal Library at Alexandria.

... Files created in WordPerfect, until fairly recently the nation's dominant word processing program, are quickly becoming as irretrievable as ragtime songs recorded on brown wax phonograph cylinders. It is conceivable that a few librarians will keep around some antique Wangs and Commodore 64s in order to access digital archives. And a tiny proportion of data will be transferred and adapted to successor formats. But for most computer users, data created on obsolete software and hardware might as well have never existed.

... Digital data works on the pass/fail basis: it's either all available or it's all gone.

Recordable CDs and DVDs have mostly replaced magnetic storage devices. But those go bad too. CDs and DVDs, explains USA Today tech writer Andrew Cantor, "have two layers encased in clear plastic: a reflective layer and a transparent dye layer. When you 'burn' a disc, your CD or DVD writer fires a laser at that dye to create dark spots that don't let the reflective coating shine through. Your computer reads the dark and reflective spots as the ones and zeros of your data. But some dyes are better than others. After a while those burned-in opaque spots start to get less opaque. The disc fails."

... Paper burns, film disintegrates, canvas molders. But there are two crucial differences between these pre-digital formats and what we're leaving future generations of historians. First, analog isn't pass/fail. You can see, and possibly restore, a stained or faded photograph. Moreover, while the majority of books printed 400 years ago have been destroyed, a few remain. Those survivors provide a tantalizing glimpse into the larger lost history. Had they been stored digitally, however, the loss would have been total: Every word of every last one would have succumbed to data rot.

from A FATE WORSE THAN DEATH