The Apollo mission data and BBC TV recordings weren’t considered important enough at the time to preserve them, it wasn’t until decades later that people realized they were but by then the BBC had destroyed or overwritten much of them and NASA had forgotten how to read much of the data. Then there was the notorious loss of many master recordings by great artists in a fire because the company was just too cheap and lazy to store them properly.

Many of the most culturally significant and creatively valuable works of literature, film, painting, and other forms of art and even science and engineering throughout history were widely panned, ridiculed, or simply unknown by their contemporaries.

“Will to maintain” comes from human people. And frankly, we’re vacillating, self-destructive, pleasure-seeking idiots with furthermore awfully finite practical limitations about what we can and want to have the will to do.

Lack of human eyes on something at a particular moment in time does not at all imply lack of its innate value. It doesn’t even guarantee lack of human eyes on it at a later date. Imagine if Da Vinci’s private notebooks, or Lovelace’s programs, or Van Gogh’s paintings, or Fermat’s humblebrag, or Melville’s writing and Dickinson’s poetry, or even Anne Frank’s diary, were saved on MicroSD instead of as physical hardcopy.

If there is a will to maintain it, it will endure. If there is no will, should it endure?

“Everything dies unless significantly effort and resources are constantly expended to maintain it” … Is not a world that I think I would prefer to live in.

…It would be an empty world and yet a violent world, filled with only the most trite and self-serving patterns designed and evolved to extract a profit in the briefest moment before they vanish. Even the stuff that does get “maintained” would have no fixed form, no verifiable truth, and no shared cultural experience or memory and heritage— Think of the streaming services that edit a film after it’s already been released, and imagine doing that to something like, E.G., Citizen Kane. Many of the things that we take for granted today— and probably most of our sense of cultural permanence, heritage, continuity, and memory— Might not really be possible in such a world.

And frankly, that’s going to bleed over into our politics too. Focusing exclusively on the single instant of the present because you no longer really have access to the past is a great way to make lots of selfish, impulsive decisions with disastrous consequence. It might even cause some degree of technological and cultural stagnation, as due to both psychological preferences and economic inequities, “will to maintain” is probably going to be heavily biased towards things that are already part of the status quo.

Physical media is at least somewhat inherently stable without constant maintenance on culturally relevant timescales, but digital media isn’t. At the same time that digital information technologies allow vastly greater quantities of valuable information to be assembled and disseminated, they also provide no practical way of passively preserving basically any of it. The invention of writing is fundamental to civilization, but the way it works is changing. Compared to the previous balance of capacities, we are now culturally capable of experiencing much, much more than we were before, but guaranteed to remember basically none of it— This is dangerous, or at least concerning and troubling.

Life is the perpetual fight against entropy, in all its forms. Meaningful information requires a lot of effort, work, insight, and feeling to put into words and pictures. Letting it be forgotten means forgetting who and what and why you are— Just because you can’t spare the CPUs and the technicians to keep its server up.

There is a will but there aren’t enough people with enough brain power to actually do the steps needed. Should it endure? I don’t know, maybe the last few decades should be forgotten.