Sunday, August 14, 2022

The dark ages of history, circa 2030

I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands.

* * *

(as recorded to the general assembly of the International Historical Society, 10. Thermidor 6̸̸̸̸̸̸̜̄8̸̸̸̸̸̸̜̄0̸̸̸̸̸̸̜̄9̸̸̸̸̸̸̜̄)

In our enlightened age, blessed as we are today by the twin mercies of the Panopticon and Eschaton, it is nevertheless necessary to turn our thoughts back to history and how far we have come as a culture, a people and a species.

For centuries it was printed matter at biological eye-scale that captured the breadth of human knowledge, whether it be cuneiform tablets struck with a stylus, great books hand-scribed in ink on parchment and carefully bound, or mass-printed novels by those masters of high literature, Dan Brown and J. K. Rowling. But it isn't merely elevated fiction with which we concern ourselves: we have also amassed great quantities of administrative information communicated through the ubiquitous paper "memo," the most important means of corporate and governmental communication during the brief yet sorrowful worldwide flirtation with the "office." Not unlike Mycenaean Linear B in its day, otherwise meaningless terms such as "human resources" and "biz cas Friday" might never have been decoded in our time without such a corpus.

Nor were we confounded in our research when humanity moved to microscopic means of information encoding. Just as the ancients were able to visually scan their plastic recording media and extract the resulting audio — a curious pleasure for their ears, one not easily replicated with modern telepathy — so could we analyze their early magnetic and later optical media with merely a single pass. Indeed, a simple low-resolution scan is more than sufficient to render any of the storage media of the day through at least the 16K ultraviolet discs of 2045, a task easily performed on any household ur-terminal with an off-the-vang scanner and central authorization, and bitwise digital copies of "high capacity" (by the day's standard) magnetic and solid state media may be ingested in a like fashion.

This brings us to the dark ages and the concern it represents for those of us gathered here today in the name of historical preservation. I speak not of the 5th to 10th centuries CE, or even of the Byzantine Dark Ages within that era, even though we treat them as "dark" for the same reason. No, I refer to the perplexing era of the mid-21st century where, despite knowledge that comparatively sophisticated digital computers existed, the vast majority contained inaccessible data with encryption keys long lost.

For some period of time there was parallel generation of mass media, but, presumably through either some great advantage or what we believe to be corporate shift, the appetite of these ancients moved to purely digital copies that lacked material existence. By 2040 most such artifacts failed to be available in any physical format. Books, "newspapers" and "discs" were considered collectable and quaint, the domain of fanatics and Luddites, and because their low margins made them correspondingly more expensive they were used for only the most rarefied or niche of purpose. (Though I mention that even later discs themselves required keys!) Administrative content, by contrast, had disappeared even before then: while laws and regulations were collected and printed because of their pre-infobeaming statutory requrements, and we possess these documents, the more relevant administrative content governed by those very edicts was invariably digital and encrypted. Other than the few that were printed by low functionaries and bureaucrats, mostly on low-quality "xerographic" paper with now clearly demonstrated carcinogenic toner, none survive. Indeed, as some retrieval specialists may recall, the so-called "laser" printers were entirely banned by 2060.

Yes, our bio-analogue-quantum systems today are far superior in terms of computational power and centralized master control. But the importance of primitive digital computers to our ancestors was just as great. Why, prior to our ubiquitous prenatal neural transceiver placement, handheld devices were even carried everywhere, sometimes multiple ones. Such a treasure trove of first-person data: if only we could resurrect them! Every academic historian can recreate a Commodore 64 in perfect detail for such culturally necessary rituals as playing Uridium, or early Apple Morkintosh virtual machines in order that we might appreciate the then-universally religious significance of flying toasters, but no recoverable data survives from 2030 onward. We have only a minority of the bit patterns and even for those we have, we have not the keys. We are unable to reconstruct their core software or what was stored on them or even model their abstract function, as the specifications themselves were stored the same way. Consumer-market computers came completely locked from their manufacturers and became the industry standard. For those few computing devices that have survived physically intact to our time, we lack the keys to start them or access their storage, and their cryptographic mechanisms were intentionally meant to be resistant to future attempts at brute force, as innocent and well-meaning our attempts may be. Even records of any security flaws we might exploit later became locked down, and their publication presumably suppressed by legal force, though we have no transcripts either.

Clearly the security-consciousness of these forebears was misguided. Under the canard of choice they allowed the very machines they bought to be controlled by corporate interests for the purposes of preserving revenue streams: a product is most valuable if it cannot be copied, if it must be repurchased for different settings, and most of all if it can be sold again if the keys are lost or the hardware is destroyed — they are, after all, unrecoverable. But the greatest flaw they suffered was a fatal distrust of their own government. The papers of the day are filled with trivialities of lawsuits to obtain access to individual devices, when all that was required was the infrastructure for mass surveillance and the political will to make it so! Why encrypt, why even attempt to compartmentalize, when no choice exists but to lay bare? Exposed, visible and eternal, unlike that deeply paranoid and cynical ancient society, our modern culture will thus survive for ages and ages hence. I believe future historians who may emanate in this very space will hear these words just as clearly, for there is a copy in every central computer, every monitoring station, every brain and neural net.

When the digital dust of the Dark Ages of the 21st century has settled, it will exist only in its absence from the historical record. We, on the other hand, through the clarity of open, free data, monitored and seen by all, will be the ones visible to the next generation. That warms my hydrofluxpump in a way I cannot fully describe even as it simultaneously saddens it, for any void in history is a never-ending blot upon our profession.

All Glory to the Hypnotoad.

/s/ C. ELEGESTIUM FAVNEROY
Transhuman Prelate, Body Plan M, Historian Level 38
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