Abandonware and My fears

I believe most people agree that online content should be archived for a variety of reason. The question is what steps are we taking to ensure that they are preserved.

We have plenty of archivist who specialize in newspaper, books, music, and etc. We do our best to ensure the original lives, while we create copies to ensure, no matter what, the next generation has access to the art we experienced. It’s a noble goal that most people agree is necessary, it’s why we believe that online content should be saved.

But is it?

More often then not no. The amount of times I open something only to be met with a dead link, a website unknown by Internet Archive, or the copy lost. Of course this sucks. How much good information has been lost on the web? How much art?

Think of the death of Flash, a way to imbue your site with video and interactivity. Flash was a proprietary software, owned by Adobe. When it became unprofitable, they shut it down. Tons of content was lost from the internet.

We may say, “oh no, who cares? It’s just a bunch of dead memes and edgy content.” But we should. That content reflects the internet at the time. The in-between of the modern (in my opinion sterilized) web and the old “internet highway.” It’s a part of culture. Sure, it’s not pretty, but in the future we may want to look at online culture of the time. Look at how it evolved and changed.

One piece of media was Homestuck. I will not explain Homestuck here (far too big of a topic to dive into). But many of the people who were involved in Homestuck went on to make pieces of art enjoyed by everyone (such as Toby Fox, creator of Undertale).

Luckily, Homestuck has a massive community. There has been a massive community project to recreate it in HTML. But how many works of the time have such a community.

Whether a piece of internet media survives or not depends on the size of the community.

That fact terrifies me.

When we look at video game preservation, we see something interesting. So many games are permanently stuck on their hardware. It requires a massive effort to translate games into a playable format. The fact you can still search and play DOS games is a feat of community effort, to keep it alive.

We have a term for when games and software gets stuck on proprietary software, abandoned by their IP holder’s (whether they went bunk or the IP holder just wants to sit on it): abandonedware. To translate abandonware into a playable format for us, people take on massive legal risk. They are technically distributing software that is owned by someone else (even if no one can play/use it in its current state).

So it’s up to as as digital creators (in this case writers) to use technology that will last. Karl Stolley advocates for the usage of Lo-Fi technology. Lo-Fi is characterized by flexablility, longevity, and stability. Often, this comes at the cost of an easier experience, or a lighter difficulty curve. I can explain to someone how to use Microsoft Word fairly quickly, at least compared to HTML.

But with HTML I do not have to worry about the longevity. So long as the files exists, someone can run it. Do we know if we will be able to open .docx files in 40 years, let alone 15? That doesn’t even begin to describe the security concerns that can arise. When discussing WordPress, Stolley writes:

For that one feature, they pay the tax of securing a database connection and applying software updates for the life of the project, lest the infamous pharma hack or one of its many variants compromise the site. Had such a small site been built with basic HTML, or a static site generator like Jekyll or Wintersmith, no updates beyond those routine to the web server itself would likely be needed.

Why do we as writers allow for such massive companies to control our process. The tools are there. It’s just a matter of learning them. So I ask, what tools are you all learning or want to learn? Why?