2019-10-28 - Ephemera, or the Consciousness of Forgetting
 ---------------------------------------------------------
 
 I've  seen  some  discussion  of  the  question  of  archiving  the
 gopherverse.  Solderpunk (as  is their  wont) wrote  a lengthy  and
 thoughtful piece [1] which I strongly recommend reading.
 
 (Incidentally, and  as an aside  - I've  never heard of  "the civil
 right" in  this context, and  I don't really understand  the usage.
 Civil, from  civilis, refers  to society, and  to public  life. The
 concept  of civil  rights derives  from  that into  the 1600s,  and
 refers to those rights natural  to people which are restrained only
 insofar as  necessary for  the public good.  "The civil  right", in
 that context, makes no sense to me)
 
 Some of the commentary on solderpunk's piece has  shown, of course,
 divided opinion. There are those who claim that all statements made
 in  public are,  res  ipsa loquitor,  statements  which become  the
 property  of the  public. This  claim is  as nonsensical  as it  is
 legally ridiculous.
 
 By making a statement in a public place, I do not pass ownership of
 the  content I  have  "performed"  to anyone  else,  I retain  that
 ownership, it is  mine, noone elses. I may have  chosen to permit a
 certain  group  of people  to  read  it, or  hear  it;  I may  have
 restricted that audience in a number of ways, be it my followers on
 social media,  or the small  but highly-regarded phlog  audience; I
 may have  structured my  comments to that  audience, such  as using
 jargon on  a mailing list  which, when  quoted out of  context, can
 appear to mean something quite different;  I may just have posted a
 stupid or ill-judged photo to my friends.
 
 In each of those  cases, it is specious to claim  that I have given
 ownership  of my  posts to  the  public, forever,  without hope  of
 retrieval. It is  not the case that I have  surrendered my right to
 privacy, forever, to all 7.7bn inhabitants of this earth.
 
 To take an apposite and contemporary example - Katie Hill, when she
 consented to her  husband taking intimate photos,  did not consent,
 nor  could she  consent,  to  those photos  being  spread all  over
 various websites, ending her political career.
 
 In much the same way, I reacted strongly when I realised that posts
 I had  made on my phlog  were appearing on *google*  thanks to that
 site's  indexing of  gopher  portals.  I did  not  ever consent  to
 content  I made  available over  port 70  becoming the  property of
 rapacious capitalists.
 
 I  hold the  same  view  regarding archiving  of  gopher sites.  If
 confronted with  such a putative  archivist, I would state,  in the
 simplest possible terms:
 
 "Who the hell made you the arbiter of this?"
 
 Sysdharma posits  an archival  tag for  publication [2]  a proposal
 that  is  not  without  merit.  I think,  however,  that  the  most
 appropriate  solution  is  to  have  a  robots.txt  file  for  each
 gopherhole, one which allows the content creator the right to say:
 
 "You can archive the posts in the folder marked public/, but that's
 all."
 
 The content  creator, after all, is  the *only* person who  has the
 right to  make that decision, they  are the only one  who knows the
 audience they  are willing  to share something  with, and  the only
 ones who are the arbiter of that.
 
 Does this mean that some things will be lost? Yes.
 
 Is this a price worth paying? Absolutely.
 
 We cannot repeat, again, the errors which led us to the modern web.
 We  must  not permit  the  same  brigading, the  same  context-free
 quoting,  the  same mis-  and  dis-information  which the  web  has
 facilitated. We  can start doing  that by protecting the  rights of
 content creators.
 
 Content which is ephemeral is not lost. If it has caused a reaction
 within us,  then it has  served a  greater purpose than  a thousand
 thousand archives of everything which  has ever been. When you read
 a  phlog post  or  other  post, remembering  that  it  may be  gone
 tomorrow does  not impact your enjoyment  of the post. If  the post
 has meaning for  you, then reach out to the  creator, talk to them,
 perhaps they  have more to  say which may  be as meaningful,  or as
 important.
 
 For  small creatures  such as  we,  the vastness  is bearable  only
 thought love
 
 -- Carl Sagan
 
 [1]: gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/the-individual-archivist-and-ghosts-of-gophers-past
 
 [2]: gopher://sdf.org/1/users/sysdharma/phlog/./2019.10.28