The Lost Art of Lost Art
We claim human history is an unbroken evolving line, then burn libraries, murder scientists, and abandon data by the ton
On January 31 2015, a fire “broke out” at the Scientific Information on Social Science Library in Moscow.
Founded in 1918, the library’s somewhat-redundant name reflected the bulk of its collection: oral transcription, pamphlets, and memorabilia of the rise of Communism in Russia. Perhaps then it’s no stretch t0 speculate that the modern, hypercapitalist underground arm of Russia (i.e. one controlled by Premier Vladimir Putin) burned it down in a show of cultural arson.
Nearly 21,500 sq. feet and 5 million documents went with it, nearly 2.3M original and irreplaceable.
Not to be outdone in any race to censorious radicalism, the Islamic State had invaded the Central Library of Mosul a month prior and removed and destroyed 2,000 books deemed secular., burning some in front of students.
In just this last few days, a prominent critic of Putin was shot to death near the Kremlin. Thousands of citizens poured into the streets, gloriously, but the man (and dozens of journalists and whistleblowers like him) are still dead: silenced.
Thus crucial knowledge passes from the world.
Memorabilia is a funny term.
For some it is a scattered, twee set of ceramic figurines from long-ago trips to amusement parks. For humanity at large, our memorabilia is locked — like carbon into soil — into our objects of culture. Here a Mickey Mouse keyring, in the Library of Congress a tinny recording of Leadbelly interrogating his woman’s fidelity.
If history remembered instead of humans, perhaps we would be afforded a straight, satisfying line from cave paintings to the digital architecture of an interactive album. But instead what appears when history is looked at as a whole, is a jagged, steep, and altogether undirected stumble towards new paradigms, new languages, and crucially for us denizens of the 21st century, new systems to read whatever we put out there back.
We’re lucky for now—for millennia we had the reasonably durable (though unfortunately flammable) papyrus at our behest to pour our cultural heritage, our economies, and finally personal reminiscence. Prior to that, receipts and information were literally etched in stone, which had obvious portability issues.
The ancients could not scrawl their “blog” type thoughts so it was reserved for the very important missions, like grain counting and translating between languages.
The historically quite-recent switch to digital communication was touted as a way to make the knowledge within last not just thousands of years, but forever.
That claim didn’t pan out.
In fact, the rapid extinction of digital information will arrive very soon (or is already here), warned Vint Cerf, a Google executive with the nickname “The Father of the Internet.”
Cerf witnessed first a trickle then a firehose of data blast into the internet (295 exabytes as of 2011, which surely with NSA collection has surpassed 300. An exabyte is a number with 25 zeroes behind it by the way.) in the last 3 to 5 decades, so he knows a thing or two about “bit rot” or the very real possibility that Gidget A that remembers how to read your Facebook status or Word document with your thesis on “Effects of In Vehicle Terrain Analysis” will not know how to adapt in a world that uses Gadget B. That world is coming very soon, if not every day.
Even that pdf you scrawled your professional ambitions on is unable to be interpreted with anything but a slow, biological eye and a toddering infrastructure of vocabulary, heuristics, and memory. To ape a Jaden Smith quote, if computers do not have eyes to see or search or provide — what human eyes will ever see it? All our petabytes of memory, exciting electrons and little else.
Information on the internet is already blocked in mundane ways— when a friend abruptly shut down her website host, I lost most of my college correspondence, which I recall with some bitterness had bootleg mp3s galore. If you were an early member of Myspace, bit rot of a manner has happened to you. Creation held, and then snuffed.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120201123937.htm
Other times the act of cultural abruption is malicious though unintended: 30 or more AIDS and HIV researchers perished in this summer’s plane downing above Ukraine — their papers and research may remain, as well as colleagues determined to go on, but it is undeniable that the years taken from the scientists could also be measured in hundreds, maybe thousands of years taken from the lives of those they could have treated. We are behind again, perpetually.
Cultural aggression takes its toll everywhere, not on Middle East and Russo historical libraries that will blot out our previous centuries for us for censorious political and religious reasons. Neglect may steal the rest from us.
From the painters of the Classics, unlocking perspective was the splitting of the atom in art. Suddenly depth and reality could almost be depicted, which is why they busily set to work detailing the most muscle-bound forms this side of Men’s Health Magazine. But with the deconstruction of many empires, the art of perspective was gone. The poor saps of the early Dark Ages barely had the means to sculpt, certainly not with stone, and not with the fine, hyperrealist art of their forebears—why?
Because they did not know they had forebears.
In 2100, is that what we will find? Will we be underwater?
Are we all a small Ozymandias, throwing our learning, culture, science, and dreams into a hole?
All I know is that hole appears so deep and unending that the petty notion of “progress” seems like the flimsiest fairy tale we ever told ourselves.
This article comprises part one of an ongoing exploration into data.
