💾 Archived View for nomadpengu.in › thoughts › digitalmemory captured on 2023-01-29 at 15:37:52. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Posted on 2022-07-28
There's been some discussion about the nature of search engine rankings.
gemini://auragem.space/devlog/20220722.gmi
I especially liked clehaxze's post on it, which digs into the ideological underpinnings of search.
gemini://gemini.clehaxze.tw/gemlog/2022/07-22-search-engine-dilemma-bias-vs-accuracy.gmi
But this all begs the question, why do we need search? Is search good for the community?
I myself am a datahoarder in some respects, and the thought of content being lost to time brings me no pleasure. However, I think it's worth considering that an immortal, searchable archive of everything may not be an unequivocally good thing.
Ironically, this post was sparked by reviewing some of my old Kindle highlights. In _Ghosts of My Life_, Mark Fisher, referencing Baudrillard, wrote that computers don't really have memory, because they lack the ability to forget.
I'm sure most WWW refugees here in the smolweb will agree that it is not lack of information that plagues the internet, but the overproliferation of it. The human brain is able to function efficiently and produce understanding pricesely because of its ability to forget. We filter out irrelevant information which is discarded, and relevant information is compacted into increasingly abstracted concept-packets.
The internet is kind-of-good at synthesis and abstraction; Wikipedia is a pretty good example of this. However, the internet is utterly incapable of discarding irrelevant information. Thus, when we want to find information, we rely on search engines and their algorithms to filter things for us.
Also relevant, Guy Debord writes the following on the development of linear time and its connection to writing:
This irreversible time is the time of those who rule, and the dynasty is its first unit of measurement. Writing is the rulers’ weapon. In writing, language attains its complete independence as a mediation between consciousnesses. But this independence coincides with the independence of separate power, the mediation that shapes society. With writing there appears a consciousness that is no longer carried and transmitted directly among the living — an impersonal memory, the memory of the administration of society. “Writings are the thoughts of the state; archives are its memory” (Novalis).
This state of affairs accurately describes the way that the internet currently functions. Regardless of who controls the internet or how decentralized platforms are, the fact that you can always dig back in time and find digital traces of everyone's pasts means that we are constantly participating in an administrative surveillance state. (At least, each of our online identities are -- what connection an online identity bears to your personal identity is a topic for another time.) The problem then, is not that a state or corporation controls the internet, but that the internet itself _assumes the state form_. Everything can and will be held against you in a court of law. Identities are not allowed to be changing and dynamic -- if you change as a person, your only choice is to discard an identity and take up a new one.
The bourgeoisie has thus made irreversible historical time known and has imposed it on society, but it has prevented society from using it. “Once there was history, but not any more,” because the class of owners of the economy, which is inextricably tied to economic history, must repress every other irreversible use of time because it is directly threatened by them all. The ruling class, made up of specialists in the possession of things who are themselves therefore possessed by things, is forced to link its fate with the preservation of this reified history, that is, with the preservation of a new immobility within history.
A function of the infinite archive is that those who control the relevance of data controls the history of the intrernet. No centralized search engine can ever reflect the will of the community; only through communal forgetting can a community produce it's own episteme.
Here's a science-fiction proposition for an internet of the future, completely disconnected from feasibility, but nice to think about.
- Communities are grouped together around distributed hubs, like Mastodon/Fediverse services
- Content is propagated along these community links. There is no way to search the entirety of the web.
- Content that is not propagated after x amount of time is permanently deleted. This has the side benefit of reducing ecological impact, as the size of the internet will increase much more slowly and storage will not need to expand exponentially. Since content is propagated along community links, if a community decides to forget something, it is forgotten.
- Content is archived only by individuals. Archivists would be knowledgable on the topics they archive. Instead of talking to a search engine, you talk to a person, like you would at your public library.
Thoughts? Comments? Email me.