A Prehistory of the Cloud by Tung-Hui Hu

Author:Tung-Hui Hu [Hu, Tung-Hui]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Computer networks, History, Popular works, Internet, Social aspects, Popular works
ISBN: 9780262529969
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2015-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 3.2

At the Swiss Fort Knox in Saanen, Switzerland. Photograph: Information & Software Engineering Group, Technische Universität Wien. Courtesy of Andreas Rauber.

Addressed to the data archeologist of the future who might decipher its contents, the “digital genome” box included five digital files—a sample JPEG image, an HTML webpage, a QuickTime movie, a PDF document, and a Java program—along with the 6,085 associated other files required to decode, convert, or view those file formats, stored on mediums from punch cards to DVDs. But the box is not accessible to any user in the current moment; instead, the box is a time capsule to dramatize the problem of digital preservation. The primary purpose of sealing the box inside a data bunker named “Swiss Fort Knox”—located somewhere near Saanen, Switzerland, though the exact location is a closely guarded secret—ensures that the box is hidden from view. Sent into a quiet and undisturbed limbo, it now waits for a future moment when these “digital genomes” may be reanimated and resurrected, like new plants grown from the seeds of extinct plants.

The consortium’s project, named Planets, presents a common narrative from the field of digital preservation. The consortium’s brochure opens with an illustration graphing the declining lifespan of each successive media: clay tablet, papyrus, vellum, and so forth, finishing with magnetic tape, disk, and optical media.65 And the burial project itself states the case for a digital genome by describing the inevitable changeover from analog to digital: “We do not write documents, we word-process. We do not have cameras and photo albums, we have digital cameras and Photoshop. We do not listen to radios and cassette.”66 The implication, the consortium makes clear, is that each medium has a certain lifespan, after which it becomes replaced by the next one. Yet what is most interesting about this narrative is how it frames media as either living or dead by contrasting the “live” updates of an Internet-connected database with a “dead” one: “The term database suggests a living entity; is a dead or decommissioned database still a database?”67

By doing so, the Planets project picks up on a widespread rhetoric of media as dying or dead, with each “death” and “birth” of a medium said to signify a historical rupture or break. In a historiographic model Paul Duguid termed “supersession,” each successive medium is said to kill off the previous one. Duguid illustrates supersession by quoting Victor Hugo’s archdeacon: “This will kill that. The book will kill the building . . . The press will kill the church . . . printing will kill architecture.”68 At roughly the same time as the publication of Duguid’s historiography, Bruce Sterling put the phrase “dead media” into circulation with his 1995 “Dead Media Manifesto,” which called for a community of “communications paleontologists” to track down obsolete and completely forgotten medias—everything from Incan quipus, a counting system using knots on string, to Victorian phenakistoscopes, a pre-cinematic moving image technology.69 More recently, a number of media scholars have expanded the field of

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