i think always about how HD and then flash recording made it so much easier to create video but hard drives and flash drives don't become their own archives. nothing stored digitally will ever last as long as any videotape
the act of recording onto a videotape created an enduring (30+ year) record of that footage. it required positive effort to destroy the footage. i would guess the current shelf life of an mpeg is 2-5 years, averaged across the US, and millions of things can shorten that
i mean the same applies to film photos and post-its and typewritten memos but the information density of those things is incomparable. videotapes were remarkable because they stored the equivalent of 20 gigs of data inside of two dollars.
and what was serendipitous about it was just that you didn't have to spool stuff out to this format. you didn't have to choose to backup. you only had to not choose to destroy.
as the need for intermediate production stages diminishes and everything becomes "data" on a general-purpose computer that does a million other things, we lose all those info-dense castoffs. that saves resources but... is it a waste if it creates a record in its wake?
99% of what's being produced in all the injection molding factories in china right now is meaningless. carries no message, no individuality, not even the implication that this is what humans liked right now since so much of it is 15 year old products nobody wants
all the plastic and chemicals that were going into cassettes and floppies and film are now being used to produce <checks notes> 2004-era MP4 players which the factories just never stopped making, 100% of which go into a landfill without ever being used
in retrospect, all the resources that were going into producing "the closest thing to indelible records of private and public life that we've ever known" do not seem so wasted now.
it's just endlessly frustrating that the existence of humans left a literal paper trail for dozens of millennia and then it just stopped. if a 31 year old dies and you clear out their house, will you find anything they created or in any way affected other than a hard drive?
you'll find no printed photos, no handwritten notes, no letters, no diaries, no tapes. their life happened on a server in california that nobody can legally touch, or a hard drive that hopefully hasn't failed.
we are rapidly approaching a time when we will leave no footprints. there will be no evidence that any of us existed at all. only copywritten blurbs on commercial packaging, the same in every household.
we are taking the initiative, prior to our extinction, by ensuring we leave no messages behind. by 2040 when it all collapses for good, maybe we'll have shoveled the last of our records into a furnace and dusted our hands, to leave a scarred and speechless Earth as our swan song
alien archaeologists will not be confused by our tumblr posts. they'll just find a world full of dead steel and failed silicon, and will leave wondering who made it all.
