[liberationtech] Surviving the Coming Data Purge (was: economic cost of lost emails.)

[J.M. Porup]

On Sun, Aug 24, 2014, at 18:55, Al Billings wrote:
> 
> On Aug 24, 2014, at 1:20 PM, taltman <taltman1 at stanford.edu> wrote:
> 
> > Everything online is ephemeral. Just look at studies on link rot:
> > 
> > http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs
> > 
> > For storing the totality of humanity's work, we need to design something
> > more like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault:
> > 
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
> 
> Someone explain to me why I’d *want* my emails stored until the end of time. I’d rather they rot and disappear if I made no effort to keep them.
> 
> That said, the NSA has a pretty good archive.

Jokes about the NSA's archive of your email are cute and all but they miss the point.

The goal is to ensure the survival not of conformity or trivia, but of dissent. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a good analogy--storing a hundred million seeds of the radiata pine or GMO corn is great if you're Monsanto but somewhat less good if you want to ensure genetic diversity.

A purge is coming. First of data, then of users. Distributed, decentralized data will survive. Users in countries hostile to American interests will (hopefully) also survive.

Plan ahead.

Jens

--
J.M. Porup
www.JMPorup.com