#the internet is a perpetually burning library of alexandria

[myonlypen]

The internet is a perpetually burning Library of Alexandria.

#the internet is a perpetually burning library of alexandria #gfycat #fuck social media giants tag

[themistressofdolls]

Deviant art saw the backlash to ecilpse years ago and asked "How do we further speed run flushing our site down the toilet?"

#Besides the pro IDF stuff too with whats going on in the world #The sites been flooded with AI content slop and hacks trying to grift commission money off AI art #Also rumors they have been torching kink art #the internet is a perpetually burning library of alexandria #deviantart

[a-god-in-ruins-rises]

#man i remember i used to listen to this song #like over ten years ago #there was a music video #i can't find it now #but the music video captured exactly the vibe of my childhood #but man this makes me sad #this is the shit i'm talking about #i grew up being told to be careful what you post online #because it's there forever #but that's not true #so much shit gets deleted and will never be recovered #someone probably has that video out there somewhere #but who knows who #and whether they'll ever post it again #the internet is just a perpetually burning library of alexandria #anyway i remember i used to listen to this shit #sitting in my backyard #writing my cringe poems #while listening to the wind chimes #and the distant train #and listening to this right now brings me back to that moment #can't even remember the last time i listened to this

[apollos-boyfriend]

nothing makes you realize how much of a perpetually-burning library of alexandria the internet is more than trying to download sims cc

#icarus speaks #ill see a cute image and be like 'oh. let me click that link!' #blog? gone. not even moved. just deleted #i have so much cc i can't find anymore #bc the blogs i got them from are just deleted

[darubyprincx]

sigh. the internet really is a perpetually burning library of alexandria. anyways time to start backing up old hermitcraft videos

#ray's tag

[classicteacake]

WHOA ok it's been a million years since i checked on it, but my old friend-ler blog from 2012 got absolutely nuked somehow

rip friend-ler. you were around for probably a few months but i'll still miss you. lost to the perpetually burning library of alexandria that's the internet o7

#rambling

[40ouncesandamule]

We are living in a dark age

While it is easy to see and celebrate the advances around us, it is important to not be fooled. A library of Alexandria is being burned everyday. Every day we are losing knowledge. Whether it be websites becoming defunct or links breaking or forums becoming discod channels or floppy disks being thrown away or cd readers being removed from laptops, despite the old adage that "the internet is forever" what is actually true is that what is archived is kept.

Why does this matter? It's important to realize what a dark age is. People in dark ages don't stop innovating or learning or discovering. What happens is that these innovations and discoveries are not able to be transmitted. As a result, these innovations and discoveries are constantly found and lost as opposed to being built upon. Instead of learning from the past, we become trapped in a perpetual present or an "end of history"

Our dark age is not limited to what we typically consider "technology" but rather every aspect of our society. We are hemorrhaging institutional knowledge. The people who knew how to run and maintain the factories did not train their replacements because the factory was shipped overseas and will be perpetually in a vulgar race to the bottom for wages. The people who knew how to land on the moon are dead or haven't trained replacements so the actual unwritten institutional know how has died with them.

This dark age is not just institutional but also personal. People have not been taught how to sew or weave or crochet or change their own oil or replace their own brakes or jump a car or butcher their own meat or churn their own butter or grow their own plants or poach their own eggs or fry their own chicken or bake their own bread or make anything from scratch. This means that the institutional knowledge of how to actually do it has been lost. It may be rediscovered or it may not.

We do not know how to crank start our cars. It's easy to say that because there are not automatic starters that it does not matter but what if the knowledge of this skill is applicable somewhere else? What if knowing how to move your body that way is the key to someting else? This is the problem of living in a dark age.

Advances and breakthroughs frequently come from synthesizing previously unconnected discoveries. The smartphone is the perfect example of thousands of little discoveries coming together to produce a breakthrough greater than the sum of its parts. The problem with our dark age is that we are losing the unconnected discoveries and throwing away the old skills because of the promise of the perpetual present, of the end of history, and that means we are not only standing in the way of innovation but also uniquely vulnerable to collapse

[girldraki]

(their favorite baby name website got deleted) Literally the internet is the library of alexandria and it is perpetually burning if any of you even care

#txt

[puppybeast]

why do celebrities delete all their old instagram posts when they start a new project. I had to go to their twitter to find the pics i wanted like twitter isn't also about to have a nuclear meltdown. it's literally not that deep but "the internet is a perpetually burning library of alexandria" or whatever

[kreetn]

Overdose by Trevor Something (Slowed + Reverb) [Video Deleted],

My Beloved.

#🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲 #feel fucking sick I just want him back #the song #I want the song back #the internet is a perpetually burning library of Alexandria

[titleknown]

Hello, sorry if this is weird. I've seen people talk about this concept called "entitlement to art" as arguments against piracy or having to share art, and there's something about that train of thought that bothers me greatly that I don't know enough to refute. I know your big thing is copyright reform and open source art, so what I was wondering is do you happen to know anything about whatever this is? Is it good for reasons I don't know or is it a bad argument? Thank you if you reply!

I have thoughts on this long-stewing, and I may as well bring them out now.

So, to be blunt I do not give a shit about the sacred monopoly of the author via copyright, I care about ensuring creators get paid. These are not inherently the same, but too goddamn many people think they are.

Because, to be blunt, the internet is a post-scarcity system for distributing information. Reproduction of information; if you’re not attracted to things inherent to the dead-tree nature of traditional books; is basically infinite. This is the inherent nature of this system, to view people wanting it to operate as it should as “entitlement” is more than a little silly.

But, to a system built around rent-seeking on limited resources, IE, book sales, it is basically an existential terror, doubly so when they’ve built that limited nature into the system for making a living off of one of the few public services that wasn’t wholly murdered by Reagan.

So, we get the cries of how the Internet Archive’s system (Which at least tries to be sensible about what it bases its limits on) is an existential threat, and that people should just use the system public libraries do with ebooks.

But the thing is, that system is fucking terrible! It is terrible for libraries and users; overly-scarce for users and and overpriced for the libraries. And that is what the publishers want.

There could very well be a version of Controlled Digital Lending that also works to get the authors paid. The publishers are not gonna go for it. Because their endgame is that they don’t. The terrible truth is capital in any form of media production doesn’t want personal ownership like dead-tree books would inevitably convey, they want people to perpetually rent from them.

To view people telling that truth as entitled is horrifying

And, going for draconian copyright systems will inevitably hurt the artists outside of that bubble, because increased copyright enforcement is as steamroller through online artistic communities, attacking those works that depend on fair use and with it all works around them, devastating it so only already established players can survive in a form of net-gentrification.

When you destroy remix culture, the original works that accompany them or springboard from them are scattered to the four winds, because of how dependent culture is on remixing, from the sharing and iteration of blues to the modern issue of sampling that was also put under a corporate yoke and sold back at a premium price.

Again, the people defending draconian copyright expansion say this is a sad coincidence, but on the part of their bosses; it isn’t. They say that if they just would follow the rules it’d be okay, but that too is bullshit. Media often depends on unauthorized circulation or remixing of out-of-print works to keep works relevant (Mah Boi, Keep Circulating the Tapes), they just want to control when they pull the rug out to get back that exclusivity, while reaping the rewards of the free labor.

To view the acknowlegement of that truth as entitlement is punching down; at best.

And that’s not even getting into the hegemony of corporate control that the destruction of unauthorized archival represents. I’m sure those authors who support it have their reasons. I’m sure also the people who burned down the Library of Alexandria, or who destroyed all those original Doctor Who tapings had their reasons too.

History still does not look kindly on them. And to view people who want media to avoid that fate as “entitled” is also something history will not look upon kindly.

And, it’s a special kind of denial to say that these bad results on the part of the action by your bosses you’re advocating for are just tragic coincidences rather than the whole point of action on the publishers’ part.

Because, when you see them talk about it, you see that so much of it boils down to a view that there is no alternative. That either the system as it stands must be maintained, or they will be impoverished. That, to draw from Miss Gender-Neutral-Toilet herself, "There Is No Alternative"

Which leads to the point that, I think that there is an entitlement on the authors’ part. An entitlement to the protection of the current system that elevates them over the unwashed masses or artists not lucky enough to have big daddy publisher on their side.

Because they view it as their only source and they’re willing to throw everyone else under the bus to do so. Which, is understandable, but also the same motive as every Fox News viewer. You are not immune to middle-class paranoia that leads to you sacrificing everyone else (See also: Ao3 defenders, but that’s its own rant)

Like, I cannot be entirely unsympathetic when people like Chuck Wendig go “We have no social safety net,” but like… join the fucking club Chuck! None of the artists outside the system who you refuse to show solidarity with get that either! And we also have the looming sword of damocles hanging over our head in the form of potential mass-purges of our communities due to the copyright shit old-media artists keep bootlicking for! Maybe you should care about that rather than trying to maintain a system which; to be blunt, treats you like shit too!

Cause, if they kill the archive and make their form of ebook lending the only one, they’re not going to pay the authors better. They’re going to keep squeezing the authors more and more, carving out whatever gains they get from the bad system, they’ll just get extra delicious kromer from screwing the audiences and libraries too.

Cory Doctorow once wrote that there were two primary forms of wealth in the US, that maintained through labor and that maintained through property ownership. And he talked about how things went to shit when we threw away our gains from labor for the sake of gaining more wealth from property ownership, which the capital class proceeded to eat out lunch on and make a vital public good significantly worse for everyone while doing so.

Now, while he was talking about home ownership in this context, it 100% certainly also applies to wealth from copyright. Because, again, Cory fuckin Doctorow. And I think published creators should stand more with their artistic bretheren outside the system; whom copyright threatens to screw; instead of the bosses that impoverish culture and laborer alike. Prosperity from solidarity.

While I don’t think we have anywhere near the infrastructure to act on it (Hence why I look so dimly on Patricia Taxxon’s view of things), we need to start pushing for it and we need to do that now, and we need to resist any efforts made to core out sharing culture or circulation of out-of-print media in the meantime; because once a piece of media is gone, it’s gone for good.

To be blunt, if the economic model your livelihood is dependent on needs false scarcity to survive, it’s time for a new fucking economic model. Trying to cling to the old one is just its own form of entitlement.

#copyright #art #entitlement #labor #solidarity #or the lack thereof #long post

[hellomelancholic]

"the internet is a perpetually burning library of alexandria" making me feel a little insane I shall not lie

#.txt

[purified-zone]

FUCK i should have been more proactive and downloaded it. and now youtube is going to private all unlisted videos in a month because i cant find the link. fuck my life

the internet is a perpetually burning library of alexandria

[artificial-father]

There were some popular posts back in the heyday of tumblr: that were all: why is timetravel AUs always about WWII? So I’ve come up with 15 novel interesting time related AUs. Part 1/?

Archival-Futurism: the library of Alexandria was never burned down: rife with alternate timelines and events. Imagine Isaac Newton with access to Indo-Muslim proto-calculus.

Babeltongue: Humans never developed a complex variety of language, and instead speak one language comprised of every vocal sound we can make, how does this affect... every human interaction in recorded history? Do we all believe the same thing? Do we cooperate better?

Anti-Dieselpunk: set in a future without the means to achieve an Industrial revolution, trying to achieve the same feats as contemporary humans, but without fossil fuels. Would they still create electricity? Turbines? Solar and nuclear power?

Independent States of America: The States never form a formal Federal government. They can declare war on each other expand, colonize at their own rate. Certain federal events happen drastically different. Would America even resemble itself today with such inner turmoil?

United Negro States of America: At the peak of segregation, separate but equal was actually taken rigorously serious, and the black communities were given sovereignty over their own government coexisting in the space of white people: but culturally, legally, politically, and socially they mutually isolated each other. Development of cuisine, culture, industry, and music quickly started to favor the UNSA over the UWSA, politically and economically. Causing them to be a world power, with strong and amiable allies, leading into the world wars.

The Tribal Nation of America: while America was discovered and Named by Europeans, the Tribal nations were successful in reclaiming all of the colonies immediately following the American Revolution.

Idealized Steampunk: what if Ben Franklin never invented the lightning rod, and electricity stayed this mythical untamable thing? How would Tesla and Edison fared? Would Turing Machines stay theoretical.

Praecox Renaissance: the Black Plague was avoided because Europe adopted Jewish cleansing practices. The Renaissance arrived early, with no romanticizing plague doctors and victims.

Anglo-Revisionism: (subset of an earlier one) Rome never overtook the British Isles, leaving the kingdoms untouched leading to different political ties, motives, and linguistics.

Tardy Migration: humans didn’t leave Africa until after the Ice Age had happened. Instead of diverging with the formation of the Sahara, they all migrated South. This created strong cultural and religious ties to Africa, once development started taking place.

Null X: A world without Christianity, interpret this to your own accord. Would Roman polytheism be triumphant? Atheism? Islam? Judaism? Buddhism? Hinduism? Some other religion filling the vacuum? How so. Think about things like the Crusades and Inquisitions that never happened, no Mormonism. No Evangelion.

Ventuspunk: a world in the near future powered solely by wind power, who are the world powers? How is wind capitalized if at all? Can terrestrial automobiles, robots, cellphones even exist?

Slaughterpunk: the FBI never learns how to properly identify serial killers in the 70s, how is the current age faring? Does the FBI just give up or try to manipulate them from the shadows? 80s slasher films are nonexistent: is this a good thing or bad thing? DNA evidence wasn’t conclusive until early 1990–2000s at best. What is the national pop culture like? I’m imagining Beatlemania every time there’s a killing in a city, because people have grown so accustomed to it.

Perpetual Computer Age: all human attempts to create the Internet fail. Personal computers continue to progress and become more streamline. Is it even worth it? Beyond gaming? Is offline enjoyable enough to hold generational intrigue (probably).

Lunar/Martian Revisionism: What if the moon or Mars were safe to walk on unaccompanied by a space suit? Would we have colonized them by now? What if there was life on them? Would we have created interplanetary travel faster?

#AU

[brettzjacksonblog]

Preserving the Digital World Is Harder Than It Seems. This Company Claims to Have Made a Breakthrough

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were a testament to mankind’s craft and ingenuity, creations so colossal that people would travel for thousands of miles to set eyes on them. Despite the decades spent painstakingly assembling them, today just one of those structures – the Great Pyramids of Giza – remains standing, a relic of a bygone age.

If there is a lesson to be learned from the ignominious fate of the Seven Wonders, it may be this: given a long enough timeframe, everything degrades and disappears, from imposing stone ziggurats to lush, Eden-like gardens. Permanence is an illusion, a form of self-deception which we only truly acknowledge upon entering our own dotage.

The fallacy of digital permanence

It’s not just physical structures that prove to be evanescent with the application of time; it turns out the digital space is equally mortal. Despite being protected from the elements, the online world is far less permanent than we might assume.

The internet is not the ineradicable technological tool it’s made out to be. On the contrary, after just two years, one third of all data stored on the web has disappeared or changed so dramatically that the URL now links to something else. Over a period of two decades – a drop in the ocean of time for stone towers and statues – 98.4% of data loses integrity in the same fashion, vanishing completely or ceasing to be of any discernible value.

The lifecycle of web data is staggeringly short. As a result, the internet is awash with busted hyperlinks, broken file paths, defunct applications and abandoned domains.

Stop the link rot

‘Link rot,’ as it is known, is a problem you’ve likely never contemplated. Set against the idea of physical landmarks crumbling into nonexistence, it sounds rather frivolous by contrast.

However, the internet is our own modern-day wonder of the world – a digital Library of Alexandria that contains a vast store of human knowledge. Policy documents, research studies, news stories, legal guidance, even Supreme Court opinions – all are susceptible to vanishing into the ether, falling offline as though descending a sheer cliff-face into a black hole.

If such critical knowledge is vulnerable to swift degradation, not to mention manipulation by malicious forces (propagandist governments, data-breaching cybercriminals), we have a major problem on our hands. Imagine if, in the pre-internet age, newspapers and public records were burned every couple of years, the information on the page consigned solely to the memories of their fallible readers. This dystopia comes close to describing the precarious status of web data.

Must we accept this state of play? Or is there a cost-effective way to permanently store web pages, applications, and other information in perpetuity? A system for making digital data instantly accessible, ring-fencing it from the ravages of time, censorship, and fickle webmasters?

The way forward machine

This concept of future-proofing the internet may sound familiar to viewers of HBO’s Silicon Valley, which returns for its sixth season on October 27. In the show, protagonist Richard Hendricks outlines his vision for a new sort of internet, a decentralized web which harnesses the computing power of smartphones to make data censorship- and age-resistant. It might surprise you to learn that such an internet already exists, and has done since mid-2018 when Arweave launched its mainnet.

  Image source: medium.com/@arweave

If the Internet Archive is a wayback machine, providing a snapshot of the past, Arweave aims to become a way-forward machine: a distributed database that never forgets and never fails. Developed by leading scientists and engineers, the permaweb is an internet built on top of Arweave’s global permanent hard drive, wherein data cannot be lost, altered or deliberately deleted.

An immutable, decentralized web that tackles the scourge of 404s head-on, the permaweb is immune to government information control, political influence and hackers. Data lives forever on-chain, with the miners who safeguard the network incentivized to store as many old ‘blocks’ on the network as they can to increase their prospects of winning rewards for mining the next block. In other words, it’s in their interests, as well as those of web users at large, to archive web content.

Deleting the backspace key

With the web increasingly exploited by big tech and big government, the case for a censorship-resistant internet has never been stronger. Thanks to Arweave’s permaweb, an age-proof internet is now a reality, enabling existing web pages to be transferred there for safekeeping, and for apps and sites to be published there directly.

The internet as we know it is vulnerable to attack, exploitation and systemic structural decay. Solutions like the permaweb posit a new way forward, one which assures a continual flow of information, guaranteeing a cast-iron record of the internet for all time. If the internet is the greatest wonder of the modern world, the permaweb is its shield.

  The post Preserving the Digital World Is Harder Than It Seems. This Company Claims to Have Made a Breakthrough appeared first on NewsBTC.

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[michaelbennettcrypto]

Preserving the Digital World Is Harder Than It Seems. This Company Claims to Have Made a Breakthrough

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were a testament to mankind’s craft and ingenuity, creations so colossal that people would travel for thousands of miles to set eyes on them. Despite the decades spent painstakingly assembling them, today just one of those structures – the Great Pyramids of Giza – remains standing, a relic of a bygone age.

If there is a lesson to be learned from the ignominious fate of the Seven Wonders, it may be this: given a long enough timeframe, everything degrades and disappears, from imposing stone ziggurats to lush, Eden-like gardens. Permanence is an illusion, a form of self-deception which we only truly acknowledge upon entering our own dotage.

The fallacy of digital permanence

It’s not just physical structures that prove to be evanescent with the application of time; it turns out the digital space is equally mortal. Despite being protected from the elements, the online world is far less permanent than we might assume.

The internet is not the ineradicable technological tool it’s made out to be. On the contrary, after just two years, one third of all data stored on the web has disappeared or changed so dramatically that the URL now links to something else. Over a period of two decades – a drop in the ocean of time for stone towers and statues – 98.4% of data loses integrity in the same fashion, vanishing completely or ceasing to be of any discernible value.

The lifecycle of web data is staggeringly short. As a result, the internet is awash with busted hyperlinks, broken file paths, defunct applications and abandoned domains.

Stop the link rot

‘Link rot,’ as it is known, is a problem you’ve likely never contemplated. Set against the idea of physical landmarks crumbling into nonexistence, it sounds rather frivolous by contrast.

However, the internet is our own modern-day wonder of the world – a digital Library of Alexandria that contains a vast store of human knowledge. Policy documents, research studies, news stories, legal guidance, even Supreme Court opinions – all are susceptible to vanishing into the ether, falling offline as though descending a sheer cliff-face into a black hole.

If such critical knowledge is vulnerable to swift degradation, not to mention manipulation by malicious forces (propagandist governments, data-breaching cybercriminals), we have a major problem on our hands. Imagine if, in the pre-internet age, newspapers and public records were burned every couple of years, the information on the page consigned solely to the memories of their fallible readers. This dystopia comes close to describing the precarious status of web data.

Must we accept this state of play? Or is there a cost-effective way to permanently store web pages, applications, and other information in perpetuity? A system for making digital data instantly accessible, ring-fencing it from the ravages of time, censorship, and fickle webmasters?

The way forward machine

This concept of future-proofing the internet may sound familiar to viewers of HBO’s Silicon Valley, which returns for its sixth season on October 27. In the show, protagonist Richard Hendricks outlines his vision for a new sort of internet, a decentralized web which harnesses the computing power of smartphones to make data censorship- and age-resistant. It might surprise you to learn that such an internet already exists, and has done since mid-2018 when Arweave launched its mainnet.

  Image source: medium.com/@arweave

If the Internet Archive is a wayback machine, providing a snapshot of the past, Arweave aims to become a way-forward machine: a distributed database that never forgets and never fails. Developed by leading scientists and engineers, the permaweb is an internet built on top of Arweave’s global permanent hard drive, wherein data cannot be lost, altered or deliberately deleted.

An immutable, decentralized web that tackles the scourge of 404s head-on, the permaweb is immune to government information control, political influence and hackers. Data lives forever on-chain, with the miners who safeguard the network incentivized to store as many old ‘blocks’ on the network as they can to increase their prospects of winning rewards for mining the next block. In other words, it’s in their interests, as well as those of web users at large, to archive web content.

Deleting the backspace key

With the web increasingly exploited by big tech and big government, the case for a censorship-resistant internet has never been stronger. Thanks to Arweave’s permaweb, an age-proof internet is now a reality, enabling existing web pages to be transferred there for safekeeping, and for apps and sites to be published there directly.

The internet as we know it is vulnerable to attack, exploitation and systemic structural decay. Solutions like the permaweb posit a new way forward, one which assures a continual flow of information, guaranteeing a cast-iron record of the internet for all time. If the internet is the greatest wonder of the modern world, the permaweb is its shield.

  The post Preserving the Digital World Is Harder Than It Seems. This Company Claims to Have Made a Breakthrough appeared first on NewsBTC.

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