💾 Archived View for republic.circumlunar.space › users › naqd › thoughts › 210418-hashing_ashes.gmi captured on 2024-06-16 at 12:59:43. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-04)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This probably fits the larger theme of what I want to write about, but I haven't figured out how.
Something "funny" happened last winter when I stumbled upon that Humdog ranticle I've referred to previously :
I was looking for signs that one of those files had been tampered with.
Not corruption, not an honest mistake, not some bloke fixing a few typos, but an actual attempt to change the meaning of it.
Which is seriously overblown for a text file from 1994.
But on the other hand, I guess it's a sign of the times we live in, or at the very least a manifestation of this feeling of being fucked with, of content that only exists in a digital form, and effectively only exists online being memoryholed, either on purpose or through utter and absolute incompetence.
Articles linking you back to older articles you can't get to because nobody cared, and even if the actual content is still hosted on the same website, the links are way too different to guess the new url ?
Articles literally disappearing overnight because someone fucked up, or got caught trying to fuck with your head ? Just wait a couple days for twitter to calm down, nobody archived the page anyway.
I don't really know where I'm going with this. That phenomenon can be interpreted in lots of different ways, some downright paranoid, others that imply the kind of incompetence and lack of foresight that should have tanked our civilization long ago.
What I do know is that I'm fed up of having to hoard shit, shove links into the wayback machine for hours on end just so I can find anything two months later, second guess every single ebook or pdf I get my hands on and so on.