## 49 Digital Ephemera

It was a post by @mos_8502@studio8502.ca on Mastodon that gave me the idea for this article. We live in a digital age and many people use de-materialised files when others use online tools and streaming services. But most of them forget that everything is ephemeral, from the file format to the digital contracts with these services.

Mos 8502 wrote this : «A reminder from someone who’s been around the block more than a couple times: when you see a PDF or ePub on the Internet that you think you might want to read eventually, go ahead and download it, and squirrel it away for the future. The Internet is not, in fact, forever, and Capitalism will eventually take away anything it can’t rent out to you». He/she is a retro-computing fan, of course, and that's why this topic is important to him/her. If you remember what you used to listen to or read 15 years ago, it was sometimes very different from today. Imagine this for 25 years, etc... I still have LPs, but the record player I use needs a little repair. I don't have cassettes any more, but I still have a player for them. I have all my old cassettes on CD now... And 60% of my CDs in digital format on my NAS. As for LPs, some of them are rare and forgotten by record companies and even by fans who share them on some fan sites.

But it's not just culture, it's everything digital. Archive.org, the INA for France, some libraries store a lot of documents. Even CDs and DVDs are ephemeral, as their lifespan can be between 10 and 50 years, if not more, under optimal storage conditions. But one of the keys is to be able to read the format of the files. "Digital Humans" are very proud of inventing new formats for everything, especially for non-free software, what we call proprietary software. Look only for compressed archives and you will find tar, gz, rar, zip, 7z and other abandoned formats on Mac OS and other operating systems. Even within a single format there are several versions and some are incompatible. Free software is no better, but at least you have the code to understand how it works... if someone keeps the code, of course. 

Another problem is that the modern web is ephemeral. If you have to search for something old using a search engine like Google or Bing, you will be very disappointed because the first results will be the most recent documents, often linked to current events. If you want a better result, you have to specify a date or some other precision. Of course, you often don't know that and that's why you use the search engine. It's the same with cultural objects and files. You'll find more on the cover or a remake of something than on the original work. It's a kind of Silicon Valley philosophy that everything new is necessarily better than the old information, works, etc... That's why you have to rely on services or your own actions to archive and preserve that information. I remember the beginning of P2P and all the media files that people shared. It was easy to find music from the 60s, 70s, 80s and rare albums, bootlegs. Now it's harder and I'm very happy to have kept old files, CDs, LPs and a little bit of history. T
he problem is that it's only for me and that information is also kept by libraries and archive specialists. Is that good?

I don't think that culture needs to be kept in a dark room, protected from the outside and only available to specialists, historians and researchers. That's the whole problem with the public domain, royalty-free works and the duration of copyright. As Mos 8502 said, capitalism will take away these goods, with small modifications to extend copyrights. We are at the beginning of a new era where everything will be rented to you for what you think is a small fee. But look at the prices of streaming services and how they have developed. After a price war, the winner takes it all... and does what he wants. You're never the winner and I'm very proud that I don't give money to these services. For example, when it comes to music, I prefer Bandcamp because they give more money to the artists and keep the files (with a backup, of course). I don't know what will become of services like Deezer, Spotify and they do what they want with the record companies. It's the same with Netflix and it's not easy to watch old classics
 now. 

I remember people saying that with digital everything can be stored. Not everything needs to be preserved (see fake news and conspiracy theories) and culture needs to stay alive and not kill what was before. As I write this, Archive.org has been hacked and many services are no longer available: websites, of course, but also lists of books, music, etc. Just another example of digital ephemera.

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