💾 Archived View for reptilic.us › log › 2021-04-29.gmi captured on 2022-07-16 at 13:28:39. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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A couple months ago, as if it knew I had been thinking about this stuff, I had a hard drive die on me. As far as I can tell, it was a sudden mechanical failure that will cost more to fix than I'm willing to pay. It wasn't an especially significant drive; what I lost was mostly a collection of movies, music, and retro games. No photos or personal correspondence were lost. Nevertheless, I found myself feeling oddly impoverished by the experience: losing this drive had wiped out a huge percentage of my _stuff_.
It's an oversimplified microcosm of the thing I'm always complaining about: too much of our (that is, my) stuff entrusted to a single failure-prone device. You commit to making backups of backups of backups for the rest of your life, and hope that no random misfortune befalls any of the drives you're using. The experience gave me sudden insight into what drives record collectors. That is:
A vinyl record is solid and inert. It's relatively portable and will work on almost any turntable. The information contained on it is physically inscribed in the record's surface. It's relatively fragile and prone to scratching, yes, but chances are most of your parents' old records still play fine despite having been indifferently cared for. A record forgotten in an attic for fifty years has a very good chance of still being playable when you stumble across it. Its dumb simplicity means it has very few potential points of failure.
It's no coincidence that this is so close to gemini's implicit critique of the web. Gemini is intentionally simple. Websites, meanwhile, serve up several megabytes of superfluous data and run sketchy-ass scripts on your computer, all so you can read some dipshit's Medium post. You want something straightforward - the text of the post - only to find it obscured by layers of needless complexity.
Clearly, this bad behavior extends beyond the web. Countless times, I've had to go through a multi-step security protocol to give myself permission to read some ebook I already own on a device I've authorized twice already, all while a physical copy of the same book sits on a shelf five feet away.
An understanding of the technology is little help: when you know how it's supposed to work, it just makes you more aware of all the ways it doesn't. You see clearly how many barriers these devices place between people and their own data. Companies effectively rent people's data back to them, with the only ostensible benefit to the user being a bunch of features that nobody ever uses.
Eventually, you have to ask: what am I getting out of using the digital version? In what way is this an improvement? I know I've managed to make it to middle age without ever losing a piece of physical media to fire or flood, but I've had a hell of a lot of hard drives die on me.
You don't have to become a full-on Luddite, though. Like, there's still gaming and stuff.