ZephrC
You cannot possibly be this stupid. I refuse to believe it. If you stuff a vinyl record in a cabinet for a century, you’ll still have a mostly functional recording. If you stuff an SSD in a cabinet for a decade you’ll probably just have a paperweight at the end, and that’s comparing 70 year old analog storage technology to the current standard of digital storage. This is a consistent pattern throughout all of history. Analog storage is just far, far more robust to data loss. All the error-correction in the world doesn’t help if you aren’t actually running that error-correction constantly forever. That is the entire point I’ve been trying to make this whole time that everyone just keeps ignoring to spout non sequiturs about how digital data transmission works at me.
Okay, it’s not really the point I’m trying to make here, but since you bring it up, actually it does matter that we lose the ability to decipher the meaning of digital storage. That is a problem that has only gotten worse.
More importantly, there is meaning in handwriting. We can learn things from how different people wrote the same thing. And people do try to convey subtleties of meaning through drawing the same letter in different ways, and of course, most importantly, you completely ignored the actual point I was trying to make, that even if we ignore that and assume every B is always the same we aren’t talking about content. We are talking about storage media. Smearing ink on paper isn’t a digital process even if you’re literally just writing 1s and 0s. There have been digital ways of storing information for as long as there have been analog ones. Things like beads or knots in ropes. The reason you never hear about them isn’t because they didn’t exist. It’s because all the information they contain has decayed to nonsense. Digital is very binary that way. It’s perfectly retrievable until it’s perfectly gone. We have a lot of techniques now to help extend that useful life, but they still all require active maintenance, and most digital storage media has an average lifespan in single digit years. Even for digital information, the oldest stuff we still have around was stored in analog ways.
What makes you think we are perfectly copying the knowledge contained in texts from thousands of years ago? That is… a bold claim. Even if I were to accept that text is always inherently digital for the sake of argument, the storage medium is absolutely analog. You can use analog storage to store digital data just as much as you can use digital storage to store analog data like sound waves.
I do all those things, but how are you planning on convincing my mom to? I’ve tried. She doesn’t care. The vast majority of people are more like my mom than like you or me. We are weirdos here, and if your plan doesn’t involve a better first step than “do a whole bunch of work to change something you’re already used to” then it is not actually going to change anything for anyone other than a few weirdos like us.
I do not care if something is useful to advertisers. I care if it reduces harm. Refusing to reduce harm to chase some distant ideal that most people don’t care about while not effectively convincing them to care is counterproductive to everything that actually matters.
Digital storage devices have way shorter lifespans than analog ones. Digital information can be more reliably copied, but we are constantly losing massive amounts of information to digital storage loses when it falls out of public consciousness. If no one is actively copying it, it is doomed in the digital age. We still have analog storage that’s good enough to be useful from thousands of years ago.