*Well, I used to worry about the floppy disks, but now I worry plenty about the universities.
*People who think these knowledge institutions are stable need to go talk to the New Media scene in Holland. A paper book will persist alone in a dark dry closet, but you just can't do this constant digital migration and curation without a constant budget; it's like computing when they've cut your electricity. And they will cut your budget AND your electricity, because who the heck needs some dumb stack of old floppies? We've got emergencies, you know.
*As Stewart Brand wisely surmised many years ago, "The system doesn't really work, it can't be fixed, no one understands it, no one is in charge of it, it can't be lived without, and it gets worse every year." Digital Decay is a cousin issue to global warming, narcotics, cyberwar and the finance crisis; its resistance to easy solution is part of the nature of network culture and of market-centric globalization. There's not going to be a techie silver bullet for this crisis, any more than there was a silver bullet for the slowly collapsing space program or the toxic and unwieldy nuclear industry. People are getting overwhelmed, and the entropic rot in immaterial cyberspace is gonna take an almighty toll. We're getting the archives we deserve.
*Gothic High-Tech.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/opinion/sunday/when-data-disappears.html
