On the real causes and culprits of disposable memories

Fast food and fast fashion are bad. Fast search, that ignores old records, is much worse.

This post was not planned. I had other plans this morning. But today's DailySignals by Bronwyn Williams touches a topic so dear to me that this reaction (including some unavoidable self-promotion) really wrote itself before I could even realize it.

Williams's very interesting post, about disposable memories and digital fragility, was prompted by CNET's astonishingly dumb decision to remove thousands of its own old articles from its own website.

Here I comment some of her key points, reordered to keep this post as short as possible, and quoting previous writings of mine when necessary.

Your files are not yours. But whose fault is it?

Says Williams:

1. Your Facebook family photo albums are not more forever than your Flickr (remember that?) ones were.

2. We take it for granted that the blog post we shared yesterday will be there tomorrow, but censors, governments, web admins, search algorithms and individuals can erase and replace what was...

The only digital documents that are not yours are those that you yourself lock only into secret formats and/or on somebody else's website or platform:

Things we too easily forget, from my seminar on, among other things, how and why we CAN learn from the past.

Nobody should "make their Memex" on somebody else's computer. But it's all of us who let Google turn the Internet into one lump of Google since 2007.

As far as online documents are concerned, ten years ago I proposed a solution for real data ownership and portability. In 2023, that proposal still seems to me much more feasible, much cheaper, and much more acceptable and actually usable by real people than the other projects in the same space, whose main results since 2013 have been to let Facebook grow from 1 to 3 billion users and Google create the problems discussed today. But before asking why mine it's still only a proposal, please read here.

Digital is fragile. Not

Williams:

• Digital is fragile (centrally controlled cloud based digital has its own vulnerabilities).

• How fragile when we rely on changeable, erasable digital data

This is not correct. Ignorance is fragile. Could you afford enough physical space to keep all the text documents, books, audio recordings, videos, images you have or use today, if they were all physical, i.e. paper, tapes, vinyl albums... ? If you could, do you realize that it would take only one fire, flood, or any other accident to lose all those document forever?

Digital data can't just be duplicated countless times, without losses and at minimal costs. Used properly, digital is much, much more helpfully and practically resilient and long lasting than paper or any other analog "support":

Bits done right last MUCH longer than paper, vinyl and pretty much everything else (source).

I have thaught this for years, and may teach again, speak, research... as much as you want. Just email me.

Digitally forced Recentism

The bigger problem, which Williams is 100% right to call the more interesting, is "the reason why CNET removed its once valuable content: in order to please and dance for the latest Google search algorithm updates which now preference and new and fresh over the old and (according to the bots, less important)."

Williams then rightly asks:

• Imagine changing yourself - erasing your past - to please a changeable piece of code

• Imagine a society that believes that the new is so much better than the old that the old should not exist at all.

To begin with, it's “to please people, very few people”, not any "piece of code". Let's never mistake code with people. It's already bad to have given personhood to that other AI that's centuries old,

Then, to complete the picture as far as Google is concerned: Google deliberately forgets the old web since at least 2018.

Besides, that problem has always existed also with everybody's personal documents, not just "public" ones: on Google Docs/Drive, you could never organize your files in any way that doesn't prioritize the new over the important.

Storing documents in services like Google Docs "completely replaced hierarchy among younger people as a means of accessing information".

Finally, answering to "What is all this recency and attention bias doing to our collective wisdom and individual brains?"

On this, I can only offer three bits of food for further thought.

First, "completely ignoring the CONTEXT of progress because we are economically forced to focus solely on the next shiny thing is not sustainable".

Second, removal from online searches is almost literally the same as actual destruction of written knowledge, that is something that, historically, "usually marked the end of a civilization". (*)

Third... I'm probably weird, but pruning old content specifically to "drive more meaningful user engagement" seems to me way too similar to limiting children to "see themselves mirrored in literature", by not proposing to them stories that are not "written in present-day vernacular that are relevant to their lives".

That is, way too similar to "delegitimize classic books to shape a canon more to their (=Google's) tastes, and seek to discredit anyone who defends them" (*).

(*) But please, please PLEASE do not attribute to conspiracies that which is adequately explained by Hanlon's Razor. Recentism like this is just 200% pure, unrestrained Silicon Valley.