Sixty years ago the futurist Arthur C. Clarke observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The internet—how we both communicate with one another and together preserve the intellectual products of human civilization—fits Clarke’s observation well. In Steve Jobs’s words, “it just works,” as readily as clicking, tapping, or speaking. And every bit as much aligned with the vicissitudes of magic, when the internet doesn’t work, the reasons are typically so arcane that explanations for it are about as useful as trying to pick apart a failed spell.
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Hmm, not really a fan of the writing style but a very good read nonetheless.
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It was known that this will happen the moment Internet became a revenue stream for millions of people. Nobody has an economic incentive to keep history around forever, plus our hosting offerings and crappy internet speeds in most of the world don’t help either.
There are a lot of people, myself included, that would donate some bandwidth and disk space to participate in a globally self-replicating network of data quants but making such software (and getting the law enforcement to not hate it) is apparently not a priority of anyone. And that’s how we find ourselves in the current situation.
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