Saturday, November 9th, 2019 -- by Bacchus
Somewhere in the United Nations building in New York City, I’m sure there’s a document in more than 100 languages. It probably contains detailed instructions on the proper operation of the floor waxing Zamboni machine.
I am fascinated by fantasies of deep time. I love to think about the tiny fragments of data that, through happenstance and cultural preference and sheer random accident, will turn up in some archive thousands of years hence. Understanding that I am speaking purely in analogies, some future scholar will be dealing with a pile of files that’s the equivalent of:
Every word processing file that ever got created in the DOS era
Every file that ever got shared on NAPSTER
Every porn movie that ever got uploaded to a tubesite
Every blog ever written
every email ever sent via gmail
That’s just to establish the notion of “the researcher is working with an archive that has a large volume of random shit in it.” Now imagine: all the filenames are gone, all the dates are gone, it’s all in one flat directory, and file formats are pretty much a mystery, although you’ve got some tools that are pretty good at brute-forcing a lot of different tries and guesses. Again, analogy: imagine that somebody has shot this stuff full of holes with a shotgun, repeatedly.
Now the reality is, this hypothetical researcher in 6,210 (or whenever) doesn’t have anything like a complete archive of ANYTHING. 99% of everything from back now is irrevocably gone. Languages are dead, data formats forgotten, archives don’t exist, fact that the archives ever existed is a disputed argument among academics. The datasets they have to work with aren’t “sets” at all. They are, at best, serendipitous lumps of data that somehow miraculously didn’t get deleted or destroyed. Each one has a story, there in the deep future. Metal or quartz disks launched at the moon by people with archival agendas, money to burn, and really good luck. Data troves that people hit “copy” on every generation, for an utterly implausible number of generations. Optical disks buried in clay, in silt, in forgotten safes, in abandoned salt mines, under landfills. Compilations scraped together from the best archives that ever existed, most long failed and many long forgotten. Damned little of it, if any, making the leap all the way from “now” to “then” in one jump. Most of it the proud baby of some archival rescue, burned to some “best we can do” “permanent” storage format, then stored, dispersed, forgotten, lost, and then only some tiny fragment surviving the next long jump into the deep future. Rinse, lather, repeat, with near-total loss at every repetition.
In thinking about all this, I’m convinced that some of the best-surviving stuff will be porn, because people hoard porn. Yeah, it doesn’t get as much academic archival respect, but most serious archivists are willing to quietly give it hard drive (or whatever) space, because they are true believers and they don’t throw data out of the lifeboat. (Even the stuffy British Library has a porn collection.)
And that is why I think my good friend Dr. Faustus has done something that is not only culturally important in our time, but which has the potential to survive in deep time, with his publication of Beware The Asylum.
Beware The Asylum, which Faustus has quite sensibly lodged at the Internet Archive (the premier archive of our generation), is a no-dialog ero-horror graphic novelette with an “interesting” set of tags:
mad science, tube girl, liquid girl, insane asylum, robot, mind control, forced washing, youth serum, catgirl
Although the comic itself has no dialog, the reason I invoked the idea of the famous Rosetta Stone and wrote that huge long rambling essay about my fantasies of data in deep time (glossing horribly over all the known difficulties with long term data survival, about which I am optimistic to a point that drives data professionals quite mad) is that Dr. Faustus has written a captions file containing an totally-optional caption for each panel of the comic. And what’s more, he’s arranged to have those captions translated so they are available in (take a deep breath before reading this list aloud):
English, Arabic, Bengali, German, Esperanto, Persian, Filipino, French, Hausa, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Punjabi, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Tamil, Telugu, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Yiddish, Chinese (Simplified Characters) and Chinese (Traditional Characters)
I can’t speak for Dr. Faustus or whatever fantasies he might harbor about data in deep time, but it amuses me rather greatly to imagine that when the bug-eyed monsters from Proxima-9 are picking over the digital ashes of our civilization, they never find the riding-floorwaxer Zamboni instructions from New York City. So they wind up having to use this file, and it turns out to be their only key to unlocking half a dozen languages. Meanwhile their scholars are trying to figure out the role that catgirls and tubegirls played in our culture…
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