(See the post before this one for an article that sets context)
About three weeks ago, I had a sudden, insistent, urge to download a number of public domain texts from
archive.org. I didn't question it, though it made focusing on my day job a bit of a challenge.
A bit more than a week ago, archive.org suffered a series of attacks - first a data breach, then at least two
DDOS attacks - and it's been stymying staff efforts to repair since then. Staff report that the data is safe, but
the "onlining" is slow.
While I can speculate about who would be interested in taking such a collection down, today I'm most interested
to consider the implications of the event.
We have a nearly infinite amount of (some types of) information at our fingertips. Other types are kept under
wraps, or are seen as unworthy of recording, while other types have vanished with the last of their keepers. With
the interruption in direct transmission of all manner of life-skills, we sometimes can only read texts about
certain processes, materials, and products. The internet era, with its constant updates and upgrades of hardware
and software, its rapid changes in programming languages and supported modes of online publishing or data storage
is one in which information passes in and out of digital accessibility nearly as fast as we can convert it to digital form.
Blink an eye and trends rise and fall, attention spans shorten and falter.
If archive.org is not down permanently this time, this strikes me as a very credible practice run for our
inevitable future. Since old books are, by nature, uncommon, there's irony in the necessity of digital archives of
publications and records of ways to do things without recourse to digital or electronic tools. Glitch the digital
archive in any way, and a whole bunch of information is out of reach.
To the point, how long will it be until the world follows Cuba's lead? Our energy infrastructure, including
renewables, is totally reliant on fossil fuels. The cost of energy itself, and the cost of what's necessary to build
infrastructure, is rising steadily. When the components of a system are priced out of affordability, the system will
fail.
Some months ago, I'd plugged the main Mimeograph Revival site into the Wayback Machine to "save" it.
Funny, I had assumed that, if anything, my website would end up a casualty to whatever it is in our near-term
future that'll take websites down: energy costs, gatekeeping, my forgetting to pay the hosting bill, or what have
you... and now the saved copy is inaccessible.
What we don't save, won't be saved.
I just walked through my house, trying to chase down the "key" that would unlock a feeling I
had. The feeling, put into words, resembles something like "I'm looking for something. Something to do.
Something that I need in order to do the thing I want to do." So I caught myself scanning the surfaces. I touched my phone... no that wasn't it
(but, too, the "yes" ping of "remember that website you want to refer to") and then I stepped over to the table near the south living-room window
and went to pick up the tablet, when it hit me:
I'm trying to consciously reverse/revert/retro-activate my tech use and yet I'm surrounded by digital mediators that give me an easy fix no matter which room of the house I'm in.
So I sat back down with the little word processor, which obviously is digital.
But the excuse I use for having it and using it is that it's more efficient at working with pure text and adding it to a website than a typewriter certainly is...
and at least I'm not staring at a screen, and am actively thinking and writing instead of surfing around...
It's ironic and sad and fundamentally screwy that I'm drawn to the lowtech options, but that it ends up
with me wanting to achieve something better "in the future" (what's that term? ah, yes, conditional living... sigh...)
I want to sit down with my handicrafts and physical writing and create rather than consume.
And yet I flit from one digital tech gadget to another, trying to fill empty spaces in my thoughts rather than develop them organically.
Ahem, nothing like facing one's faults.
Here - the embarrassing facts, starting with what's nearest at hand:
ugh, and don't get me started on the upstairs studio (a mac mini and monitor, two inherited old computers that I need to "unlock")... or my closet (my dad's old laptop).
(I'm not only blown away by the amount of hardware tucked into random sections of my house, but by the lengthy explanations I've
typed up to try to justify the presence of it all. Low tech, my foot... oh my god, I just remembered that my dad's old kindle is somewhere upstairs too...).
I think it's time for an intervention - and some serious reflection on what I'm doing with all these things
and how important they are in my life. WHY am I holding on to all of them? Probably in part because I want resilient backups in place
(and nothing says that like old laptops and phones?); I know the tech is fragile - suddenly something stops working, so you turn to the backup... or "maybe it'll be useful again someday."
Maybe I think I can repurpose some of it, like the phone I can store as a pdf reader in the "bugout bag." Maybe I think that keeping all of this
(and pulling it out every six months or so to "use" it) makes it more likely that saved files will still be openable. Maybe I'm secretly unable to throw things away.
Maybe I'm addicted.
10/3/24
This project has a recursive quality. I'm using an Alphasmart Neo2* to type a text file, that I'll upload to my computer's text-only program.
If you're reading this on the mimeographrevival.neocities site, that means I've then "programmed" (can I call it programming?) or formatted the
.txt file with html so that it can appear as a web page.
So, where's the recursivity? In the fact that Mimeograph Revival is dedicated to older technologies than those currently the norm in 2024.
Older technologies (or their retro-ized modern counterparts) are what's required to make either a webpage with hand-coded html or CSS,
and they're what's required to make an old-school duplication from a mimeograph or spirit duplicator.
The two are functionally similar even if the details differ.
They both require a decision to not rely on automated processes, to refresh or learn skills no longer in demand, and they require a lot more hands-on involvement.
You have to be willing to "look under the hood" as it were, and tinker and fiddle ... and be satisfied with, or maybe be outright willing to embrace, a different aesthetic
and a different finished product than the slick perfection of high-tech output.
So, I'm making this website in this way in recognition of the low-tech future we're working our way back to,
in honor of the human ability to learn (or relearn) skills to work with materials in creative ways,
and as a way to talk myself (and anyone else who wants to come along) calmly through a profound cultural shift.
***
(I have to admit, there were a few times my smartphone-trained fingers wanted to tap the Neo2's LCD display to get the cursor to jump where I wanted it...
and then I realized I had to just scroll backward character by character, or line by line, to fix my typo. This'll definitely be a retraining process.)
(Also, as a kind of visual log of me relearning the html I learned back in the early 2000s (and starting-from-scratch with the CSS I never learned),
I'll keep my journal pages in whatever presentation they start in. When I learn something new, it'll show up in that entry - and if it's spiffy enough,
that's when I'll start a new page altogether. Kinda fun to track the development.)
*Alphasmart Neo2 - essentially a portable keyboard/wordprocessor that runs on 3 AA batteries, uses minimal power, stores 8 different text files, and
is a fantastic way to write on the go or overcome the curse of the "block of the big white page." Here are some Alphasmarts (and their kin) out in the wild.