Date: Wed, 27 May 2015 00:35:11 -0700
From: Dave Cerf
Subject: Re: The Web of Alexandria
After reading these two mini-essays, my first thought was two protocols:

permanent://
ephemeral://

I once spoke with Rick Prelinger regarding digital archiving and all the challenges it presented. He said he wasn’t compelled to get caught up with the obsessive concern of archiving every little thing. Things have always been lost in time—why should digital be any different? His own library of ephemera in San Francisco is mostly a collection of things other libraries didn’t want anymore. Perhaps what Rick was really saying is that the compulsive archivists are conflating the permanent and the ephemeral, which is a hopeless task. Just because everything is digital doesn’t mean everything should be part of the common record.

Seeing the Dynamic Medium group email printed and physically displayed made me think about this distinction in a way that surfing the web never has.


On May 26, 2015, at 10:46 PM, Bret Victor wrote:

A couple days ago, I wrote some stuff on the web about the web:

http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/

and then today, some more stuff for some more context:

http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/2.html

The first came from coming across the quoted Vannevar Bush passage in "Memory Machines".  The second because of the internet's inevitable misinterpretations, and maybe I shouldn't have written it.

I don't think they're particularly good, and they (or at least the first) is maybe "more poetic than practical", but persistence of "the record" is something I worry about.  (It's a different sort of persistence than I usually write about here -- temporal persistence vs spatial persistence -- but they're kind of related.) 

It was a weird feeling to spend the day rummaging through Doug Engelbart's private files, and then come back to finish up this post about the flaws of the WWW.  It feels so trivial, like it only matters because everyone happens to be using it.