The Digital Dark Age
by David Emberton
Last month, a Norwegian literary museum admitted losing access to their catalogue system after the database administrator died -- taking the password with him. Yesterday, my mother's computer died -- taking two years worth of email with it. The museum in Norway put out a radio call for hackers to help crack the code. My Mum? Well, she just cried into the phone for a while.
It might seem as though these two stories are only slightly related. To me, they both indicate a bigger problem.
Prior to the commercial internet and the arrival of cheap mass storage, computers were mostly used for pumping out paper documents. But with the explosion of email, web publishing and digital media in general, times are changing. Culture as we know it is going digital.
Constructing a history is fairly straightforward: In the physical world, works are tangible and rooted in time and place. Birth, death and marriage records maintained by governments allow us to trace who made what, and when. Mostly, stuff lasts.
Unfortunately, digital works aren't like that. Data is a commodity, stored in bulk on anonymous file systems, duplicated and destroyed by whoever has access. Every day hard drives fail, human-dependent backup systems fail. People die and their computers get wiped or thrown out. Passwords are lost and formats change. Corporate intranets are a mess -- if you've ever had the displeasure of using one, well, let's just say keeping everything is not the same as keeping everything organized.
Digital culture + geeks with attention deficit = uh oh.
In 2000 the University of California, Berkeley published a study showing that printed content represents only 0.003% of the world's total information -- most of the remainder is stored digitally. If that figure is correct, almost our entire output as a society is entrusted to one of several Microsoft operating systems and disks with twelve-month limited warranties.
*cue danger music*
Y2K, another problem brought about entirely by lack of forethought (plus a healthy dose of denial), has not served as a wake up call. Product development decisions continue to revolve around annual earnings. Technology uptake continues to be driven by novelty and the quest for cool. Even in the Open Source world, development is more about cloning commercial products than designing software to last a millennium.
Two hundred years from now, how will historians assess the early twenty-first century? They won't, because scarcely anything will be left to assess. That's right: Welcome, my friends, to the digital dark age.
A step backwards is not the solution, trees being in short supply and all. Besides, librarians and archivists have discovered that the books and papers we print now dissolve much more quickly than books printed a century ago. Paper isn't the answer: Our only viable option is to come up with a digital system that works.
To do this, we need to transform some of our ideas about computing.
Right now, files are stored on individual machines. It's up to the owners of those machines to make copies -- but individuals, until they lose something important to them, do not back up. We can look at P2P file-sharing systems, with multiple redundant copies of almost every file, for inspiration. Why not do the same with personal files, automatically creating mulitple copies of your recipe book across the network? You'd never have to back up again.
This isn't necessarily a new idea: Sun Microsystems is fond of suggesting that "the network is the computer" and the distributed computing concept has been around for a while. But people are understandably hesitant to store their personal files on a central server, much less someone else's personal computer. What of privacy, if your files are scattered all over the world?
That's where identity comes into play. The data and documents you create today are generic and anonymous -- they are not linked to your identity in the municipal records, nor are they proven to be authentically yours. In a lot of cases they aren't even datestamped accurately. This makes your files even on your own computer vulnerable -- a vulnerability that could be overcome by linking them to your official records. If you are going to be storing your files on someone else's computer, you'll want a foolproof way to identify that the files are yours.
It might seem abhorrent to think of some government program tagging and subsequently rifling through your digital stuff. But perhaps the government only needs to give us access to the citizenship records we've already paid them to maintain.
Unbreakable encryption is a viable solution, but only if data isn't locked down permanently. As morbid as it seems, a system that's aware of your death or permanent disablement can make sure those files are unencrypted at the appropriate time. The same system could make sure your files are released to the public domain, protected by copyright, or even deleted from the network for privacy reasons at the time of your demise.
We need a new universal storage mechanism: one that authenticates, protects and manages the data we create. In a future-conscious world, such functions would be a natural extension of the computing experience.
Finally, there is the issue of format. As proprietary data formats give way to XML, and XML gives way to whatever comes five years later, things are going to get lost in the shuffle. Who to call when you need to translate a fifty-year-old Word file? Not to mention the fact that binary storage will sooner or later be replaced with non-binary molecular or holographic storage.
By legislating in the interest of future generations, government could ensure that software companies publish closed formats to a public repository, forming the basis of a "universal file translator." Then, there would be some confidence in the accessibility of even the oldest data.
Regardless of what may or may not happen, nobody wants to be forgotten (at least, I know I don't). That's why a little danger music will hopefully be good for us, to get us thinking about how the storage decisions we make today are likely to affect the people that come afterward. And think about it we must, else what a great shame: To let the dawn of the Information Age turn slowly, and irreversibly, dark.
.
