Journal tags: truth

• Nobody writes on their own website any more. People write on Twitter, Facebook, and Medium instead. Personal publishing is dead.
• You can’t build a complex interactive app on the web without requiring JavaScript. It’s fine if it doesn’t work without JavaScript. JavaScript is ubiquitous.
• Privacy is dead. The technologies exists to monitor your every movement and track all your communications so it is inevitable that our society will bend to this reality.

These statements aren’t true. But they are repeated so often, as if they were truisms, that we run the risk of believing them and thus, fulfilling their promise.

I’ve tried to articulate my feelings about data preservation, digital decay and the loss of our collective culture down the memory hole. I’ve written about Tears in the Rain, Magnoliloss and Linkrot. I’ve spoken about Open Data, The Long Web and All Our Yesterdays.

But all of my words are naught compared to a single piece of writing by Joel Johnson on Gizmodo. It’s called Raiding Eternity. From the memories stored on Flickr, past the seed bank of Svalbard, out to the Voyager golden record, it sweeps and soars in scope …but always with a single moment at its center, a single life, a single death.

Please read it. It is beautiful and it is truthful.

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

—John Keats