Stewart Brand
Thanks to the wild acceleration of technological change. Digital Information is being rendered irretrievable almost as soon as it is stored. Welcome to what could be the dawn of the digital dark age. … Digitized media do have some attributes of immortality. They possess great clarity, great universality, great reliability and great economy–digital storage is already so compact and cheap it is essentially free. Many people have found themselves surprised and embarrassed by the reemergence of perfectly preserved e-mail or online newsgroup comments they wrote nonchalantly years ago and forgot about. Yet those same people discover that they cannot revisit their own word-processor files or computerized financial records from ten years before. It turns out that what was so carefully stored was written with a now obsolete application, in a now-obsolete operating system, on a long-vanished make of computer, using a now antique storage medium (where do you find a drive for a 5 1/4-inch floppy disk?). Fixing digital discontinuity sounds like exactly the kind of problem that fast-moving computer technology should be able to solve. But fast-moving computer technology is the problem: By constantly accelerating its own capabilities (making faster, cheaper, sharper tools that make ever faster, cheaper, sharper tools), the technology is just as constantly self-obsolescing. The great creator becomes the great eraser.