Illustrations by Megan Le Brocq
In 1977, The Voyager probes were launched into space, each one containing
a Golden Record which harboured bountiful information about life on Earth. Vital
data about societies far away; sounds, pictures, and records about humanity. But
what if you were an untrendy extra-terrestrial without a record player? All of this
material would be completely lost to you. This is what we would experience in a
‘Digital Dark Age’, where data stored in obsolete technology, such as phonograph
records, cassette tapes, DVDS, will become inaccessible to us. Let’s say, for
example, you tried to put a Floppy Disk into the USB slot of your computer. Not only
would it be a physical challenge but trying to convert the data on the disk to a format
your computer could understand would be difficult, expensive, and, if it worked,
would most likely damage the quality of your files. Ergo, your data would eventually
become just as useless and unreachable as NASA’s playlist. On an extreme scale,
this would mean an entire chunk of anthropological data missing due to our
obsession with digitalisation. But, really, why should you care about the preservation
of historical data?
Whilst doing the research for this article, I had no prerogative to move; all the
information I could possibly require was available online. While this presents an
advantage for the lazy journalist, and has obvious benefits for the purposes of
accessibility, the problem with archiving the entirety of human history in neat digital
compartments becomes obvious when these formats are rendered out-dated so
quickly. While historical artefacts can be physically preserved and maintained, digital
data also requires constant maintenance. If we want future generations to have
access to all we have stored digitally (your TikTok drafts, your Snapchat memories
etc…), data will have to be constantly uploaded and transferred to new formats in
order to ensure that not only our information stays intact but that contemporary
technology can interpret it to allow us access to our pasts.
This is not only an expensive feat, which may not be feasible for small
institutions but one which has deeply concerning environmental impacts. ‘Cloud
Computing’ has emerged as one solution to storing and backing-up our data, and
has quickly become a multi-billion dollar industry, valued at USD 495.3 Billion in
2022. While its name evokes an image of our information aimlessly floating around in
the sky, the reality of it all is not so inconsequential. Businesses implementing these
solutions produce mass amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, due to the large
amount of electricity required to keep data in ‘The Cloud.’ These emissions will only
increase until this mode of data storage no longer functions and we will have to
spend time and energy converting our data to the next best technology. One can see
how this entraps us in a vicious ecological cycle; not only do our attempts to avoid
the loss of data cause climate devastation but the ‘Dark Age’ itself will come about
as a result of the production of new technology occurring at an unprecedented speed
in an age of incessant consumerism. If we want history at our fingertips, we must find
a way to do it without impacting our future.
Considering then the cost and impacts of data storage, the question of what is
retained arises. Like in the process of physical archiving, how we curate the data we
store is understandably important. But hindsight is 20/20: how can we know what
we’ll want to look at fifty years from now? This is why the decision of what is
large corporations, generating both privacy concerns and anxieties over ‘Digital
Colonialism,’ whereby tech giants exploit and control personal data in the pursuit of
profit. These corporations are generally based in the Global North, meaning that the
data they hold onto may benefit those in the West, with our digital history
propagating a Eurocentric perspective. Therefore, if we continue to conceive the idea
of digital preservation in the same way, we will only increase the extent to which the
tech industry is an oligopoly, losing data that Big Tech deems unimportant and,
ultimately, our access to stories outside of the non-Western canon.
While having our information stored online appears a permanent solution to
the age-old concern of how to pass our stories to the next generation, it is clearly not
as simple as it appears. Our obsession with digitalisation has catastrophic ecologic
effects, requires great economic efforts and puts personal data at risk. So, I return to
the question I posed in the first paragraph. You shouldn’t care. That is to say, until
we revolutionise the way we think about technology by finding more long-lasting and
environmentally friendly ways to store our data, there is no point in worrying about
what we will lose. What is the point in conserving our history, if we have no one to
keep it for?