And All Our Words... Dust

I was intrigued to see an interesting article on the website of American Scientist magazine about the problem of the volatility of the data that narrates our civilization.  The article, “Avoiding a Digital Dark Age” by Kurt Bollacker describes in detail several examples of how our high-tech world fails to imbue our information stream with any kind of permanence, even for a few generations, let alone centuries.

This is something I have been noodling over myself for some time.  Back in 2007 I wrote about this problem myself in The Citizen Scientist (See “Words That Survive”) comparing modern methods of long-term data storage to some of the superstars of data longevity; the cuneiform clay tablet, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the papyri of ancient Egypt.  I also gave some information about the Rosetta Disk, a interesting effort to preserve linguistic information developed by the Long Now Foundation, whose purpose, briefly stated, is to try to get people to think ahead on the order of about ten thousand years.  The Rosetta Disk is mostly concerned with preserving thousands and thousands of pages of linguistic knowledge.  Descriptions, grammar, phonology, lexicography of languages that are dead or dying.

But what I do not see (and it’s possible I just haven’t looked hard enough) is the part where this linguistic knowledge is actually directed at documents.  In other words, the project does no seem to do much in the way of preserving actual texts one might want to translate by using all this carefully conserved arcane linguistic knowledge.

But the problem remains; how do you preserve the intellectual essence of who and what you are?  Granted, you take the chance that future centuries will see you as little more than a convenient warning to others, but that’s not something we can control. I would rather our world be dismissed based on what we leave behind than to see us rendered irrelevant because our society was rendered mute by its own technical cleverness.

Both Bollacker’s article and my own look for technical fixes, but in hindsight I’m less enchanted with that as a solution.  The cuneiform tablets of the city of Ebla were fired to rock-hardness when the palace was burned by the troops of Naram-Sin 4,300 years ago.  But in between that event and their discovery and translation, nada.  They may as well not have existed at all.  Other ancient texts were preserved as part of living traditions, often by people who adopted them and made them their own.  The Arab preservation of many Greek classics comes to mind, as does the copying of pagan Roman and Greek works by European and Byzantine Christian monks.  As such, they benefited by being part of a living tradition which meant that enough people were interested in these works to make copies and copies of copies.  Copious copies of something render it harder to wipe out and, as an aside, make it less necessary to hoard documents all in one place.  That was both an advantage and a weakness of the Library of Alexandria.  It was a grand, magnificent institution; much more than a collection of books.  It was a university, a laboratory, a forum, a performance center.

But its notoriety and its centralized location made it vulnerable.  It was at least partly burned by Julius Caesar during his siege of Alexandria, many of its scientific works were burned by the order of the Christian Emperor of Byzantium Theodosius in 389 CE, in an effort to rid his realm of “pagan” influences.  It was finally irretrievably destroyed in 642 by the Muslim Caliph Omar, who said that if the contents of the library were contained in the Koran, then the library was redundant.  If not, it was unnecessary.

So while I think that we need some kind of technical fix for the long-term preservation of our knowledge, it is clear from the pages of history that communities of learners and curious minds can do much to keep culture and information alive.  Frankly, we already have excellent methods available to us now.  We can keep publishing books and print them on archival quality paper.  We can continue to fund libraries.  Private collections will also play their part.  But at the end of the day, the question will come down to whether we value our history, science, literature, art, music, film, and so forth enough to hold on to it.  The communities of the curious and the passionate can do as much to tell our story to the future.