Dataclypse

During a phone conversation a few years ago, my friend Alan coined the term "dataclypse" to describe the habit my computers had developed of exploding once a year. This was probably not a matter of poorly chosen equipment or bad luck. It was a symptom of my tendency to overload and subsequently destroy any technology I regularly worked with.

At the time, most of my creative work was done entirely on the computer. On average, I had 5 audio files opened in Audacity, a few files open in Reason for sequencing, some OpenOffice documents for editing, and an instance of Firefox with 40+ tabs open. For a modern computer that probably isn't too heavy a load, but my computer wasn't exactly up-to-date. I remember several instances of critical data loss due to the way I treated computers.

I also performed maintenance and repair in a slapshod manner. On one occasion I lost 30GB of data when I accidentally reformatted the wrong partition. Since I had no organizational method, I threw out as much data as possible in order to keep the dataclypse at bay. I allowed my artistic materials to become a jumbled mess because I focused on a "final product" that would emerge from the chaos. Each project led up to its own micro-dataclypse in which the relevant working materials became lost in a sea of files or deleted completely. Because of this, a lot of things have slipped through the cracks that might have proved useful in the future.

I work in a relaxed and chaotic manner. There is no changing that, which is probably a good thing, because the work I do is dependent upon the chaotic environments in which it is created. But setting up technology to automate backups and keep my working environment somewhat stable in the long run might deter future dataclypses. It will take some effort to set up, but I believe that it is possible to use some basic techniques to immerse myself in creative pursuits while retaining data for personal and historical purposes.

Implementing a fancy organizational system is not something I'm likely to follow through on any time soon. I bought Getting Things Done a few years ago but I never got around to reading it. After listening to a talk by Jason Scott on archiving, I've decided that the best method is to throw everything onto a huge external hard drive with no thought about organization whatsoever. Hopefully whatever storage format the data I collect ends up on will be readable by weirdo historians of the future so that scans of Byte magazine and my incoherent ramblings will be available to generations to come.

BBS History

Textfiles.com is an excellent archive of ASCII text distributed during the mid-Eighties. There's a good introduction on the frontpage:

The focus is on mid-1980's textfiles and the world as it was then, but even these files are sometime retooled 1960s and 1970s works, and offshoots of this culture exist to this day.

Archival of networked data has probably become more difficult since the 80's. Organizing and presenting files from back then seems pretty simple in comparison to our present-day predicament because it does not involve the preservation of links or dynamic content. The files are self-contained and the curator can choose how they are arranged. However, without hyperlinks, it is difficult to make the historical and cultural relationship between older content and newer content explicit to the modern user.

Because the ASCII files he curates do not link to other files, Jason Scott keeps them alive by presenting them on the Internet where they can be perused or linked to by modern users. They are not "naturally" a part of the hypertext rhizome - they were written before the popularization of hypertext - but with Jason's careful presentation their historical relevance and accessibility is preserved.

With each technological shift, data format standards change. In addition, how we access and interact with information changes. Taking into consideration both how the computer accesses files and how best to present these files to the user, "porting" old content to a new era of users and computers becomes extremely difficult. When issues of copyright enter the scene, preservation and presentation to a new generation of computer users becomes even messier..

YouTube is DOWN!

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I'm hoping Facebook is next!

Edit: Okay, it's (partially) back up. You may now resume meme-watching.

Regressive Computing

I am not entirely sure what "Regressive Computing" is.

I came up with the term during an email conversation with a local friend of mine who had posted an ad for free floppy disks on Craigslist. I am obsessed with old, outmoded media and machines. I use them instead of new technology as often as possible. Another of my obsessions is codifying my obsessions. Thus, the term "Regressive Computing" was born.

The main reason for my obsession with abandoned technology is the exponential increase in speed and quantity of computer hardware, which leads to a huge amount of waste. Whether we are approaching a Singularity or not, the garbage dumps are getting bigger. As technology becomes more disposable, I react by seeking something lasting.

There is a tendency as technology advances to throw out the past as often as we throw out computers. For many users, computers arrive as if out of nowhere. The machine comes packaged, pre-assembled and pre-loaded with software. When it reaches the end of its lifespan, it goes to a different kind of "nowhere" - the dump. But there is a rich culture and history to be found that runs counter to the perceived disposability of computer hardware and software.

Computers are incredibly prevalent in American society, but there is hardly any awareness of their cultural, theoretical or scientific past. Without this knowledge, thinking about and guiding future developments is impossible. I aim to address this problem in my personal life and the outside world by disseminating concepts like Regressive Computing.

Recently, after finding a blog on testing Linux distros on old computers I had the idea of downgrading each year to the standard speed of the previous year. I'm already at about average speed for 2003. The only problem is finding the proper hardware for each year (or series of years) because so much of the hardware ends up junked. Another option is to emulate older hardware, but that would take most of the fun out of it.

Regressive Computing is an evolving concept but I will continue to post my ideas here.

Computer History

"When personal computing finally blossomed in Silicon Valley in the mid-seventies, it did so largely without the benefit of any of the history and the research that had gone before it. As a consequence, the personal-computer industry would be deformed for years, creating a world of isolated desktop boxes, in contrast to the communities of shared information that had been pioneered in the sixties and early seventies"

The above quote is from John Markoff's book What the Dormouse Said: How the 60's Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. Although the book's support of its central argument is weak and jumbled, I found its attempt at establishing computer history within a movement and culture engaging. Computing's speed of innovation and adoption creates the illusion that they exist outside society, culture, and history. But this is not and has never been the case.

As Markoff's observation suggests, in order to use computers towards a human good it is essential that they be considered in terms other than financial gain and heedless progress.

This concept - maintaining a sense of computer context - is what drove me to create Data Archaea. In my notes and thoughts I have considered computer context in terms of history, data preservation, digital archeology and anthropology. These are all components of a larger goal: raising an awareness of the past as well as the future of computers.