Recently stumbled across this phenomenon that many sites take on. Despite being someone who wants you to take on ideals, some ideals definitely nudge you toward non-confrontation of reality. I believe this ideal is one of them.
The premise is well constructed. There’s a frustration of data loss, and so we’ll fix it. We’ll design the site proper, archive all the links, and that’s all well and dandy. In fact, I’ll heed its advice. But I won’t let it comfort me.
The article throws around double digit years as if it is nothing. It is, and must be — to construct its premise — drenched in an is-ought reality. By abstracting out the currents of time, one can fade away the background of mortality. By ignoring the fragility of not just our lifespan, but of all the things we rely on: hardware, thankless peoples wiring the world together, electrical power plants — there are many points of failure. Many. You can do your best part by preserving your web-page, but the sands of time may whisk off the plank that holds it all together. I’m sure those who roamed the library of Alexandria could never think of its ashes while trying to preserve the older books.
So this website of mine is not designed to last. Not just because of mortality, but because this mode of preservation is accompanied by a passivity; a little assumption that, if I left my site all intact, that somehow it’ll change someone’s life for the better. I don’t know about that. The is-ought conundrum makes advice from even just twenty years ago null. A great example is the marketplace, how to handle your finances. In twenty years, who is to really say anything that may be of interest on this site is still relevant?
This website is not designed to last, but it does not mean it is useless. It is built for today. It is for all of the people reading it today. It is for the author today. It has no claims on the future, and the future will wipe it all away. But I’m not saying we should acquiesce to the ever-leveling sands. By confronting your mortality, you can remember that all one can do is seize today to make your difference, by carefully reserving which seeds you’ll want to plant and grow: I contend that a website is not necessarily one of them.
It can be a rallying point, but when you look back at the past, it’s not necessarily the book, it is what the book spawned; it is the buildings and lifestyle left in its wake which preserve the book. The book does not exist without its mark on the physical world. It is what the parents taught the children, the older generation to the younger — what torches did they pass on? It may start as a book, but if no followers found it worthy to propagate because of its effects on reality, that book will be unknown to us. Many followings in the past are. The power of a thought is measured by its physical impact.
Thiel once remarked, I would say that we lived in a world in which bits were unregulated and atoms were regulated. What a wonderful insight and a dreadful conclusion. No matter how many ideas you have bundled into a web-page, most people are used to being unable to claim the land they live on. To not act in the physical. That no matter how many thoughts there are, its power-scope is often restricted to virtual/internal. You can evoke internal change, but all internal change is fragile, flies away easily without a reinforced environment. There’s a strong difference between someone who clears out all the junk food in their house and someone that just says they’re going on a diet. You can have the most beautiful blueprints, but it’ll be stuck in the glowbox of your monitor, forgotten when you walk outside your door. (I at least recorded many insights without acting on them for years).
It’s genius for status quo maintenance. Restrict the physical reality as much as possible, but let people try to plant roots in the virtual. Yet clear out the server rack and it was, sincerely, all for nothing. As if it didn’t happen.
In the fantasy books, in the shows we watch, the cartoons we grew up on, the fantastical stories, the ceaseless imagination of the child: the bungalows, the stardust fountains, dragons, fairies, choco-rocky mountain, the roaming animals, open meadows, the river streams Heraclitus lounged around — we have all of these beautiful and wonderful notions of reality, but they’re LOCKED away from us now, only living in books. LOOK at what your children are left with in the physical world, if you aren’t careful! Soulless buildings, GMO food, years of life most likely slaving on something that doesn’t matter to them, nothing to call their own. No knowledge nor critical thinking. Only a claim on loss and longing for nature that’ll never be reclaimed. We have these beautiful villages hushed away in novels, never to see the light of day.
THIS is why I wrote this post; because if someone really wanted to cultivate a brighter future, if someone was sincerely concerned about passing on a torch, it is NOT in the web, but in villages with children laughing. The torch is PHYSICAL! It is touching the hearts of those around, showing what’s possible! It is forcing your ideal onto the physical reality. Not just handing your blueprint, but laying the first stone. That if you find your information life changing, plant roots not by preserved web-pages, but by CREATING what you think is worth seeing in the world, DEVELOP the system in real-time, leaving the web-page as an artifact that only points to what was made. BUILDING upon the world in which we really inhabit, not the caricature many mistake for reality!
Websites are great places to store blueprints, but predominantly only that. It’s usually an island unto itself, or if connected, isolated in virtual. If you want to battle the sands of time, it’s going to require live roots, reality.