"Society can’t understand itself if it can’t be honest with itself, and it can’t be honest with itself if it can only live in the present moment. It’s long overdue to affirm and enact the policies and technologies that will let us see where we’ve been, including and especially where we’ve erred, so we might have a coherent sense of where we are and where we want to go."

#JonathanZittrain, 2021

"In turn, the researchers Martin Klein, Shawn Jones, Herbert Van de Sompel, and Michael Nelson have honed a service called Robustify to allow archives of links from whatever source, including Perma, to be incorporated into new “dual-purpose” links so that they can point to a page that works in the moment, while also offering an archived alternative if the original page fails."

#JonathanZittrain, 2021

#Robustify

"Perma is an alliance of more than 150 libraries. Authors of enduring documents—including scholarly papers, newspaper articles, and judicial opinions—can ask Perma to convert the links included within them into permanent ones archived at http://perma.cc; participating libraries treat snapshots of what’s found at those links as accessions to their collections, and undertake to preserve them indefinitely."

#JonathanZittrain, 2021

#Perma #archiving #archives #libraries

"The project of preserving and building on our intellectual track ... is thus falling victim to the catastrophic success of the digital revolution that should have bolstered it. Tools that could have made humanity’s knowledge production available to all instead have, for completely understandable reasons, militated toward an ever-changing “now,” where there’s no easy way to cite many sources for posterity, and those that are citable are all too mutable."

#JonathanZittrain, 2021

"... the law professor Eugene Volokh was able to identify a number of removal requests made with fraudulent documentation—nearly 200 out of 700 “court orders” submitted to Google that he reviewed turned out to have been apparently Photoshopped from whole cloth."

#JonathanZittrain, 2021

#EugeneVolokh

"Libraries in these scenarios are no longer custodians for the ages of anything, whether tangible or intangible, but rather poolers of funding to pay for fleeting access to knowledge elsewhere."

#JonathanZittrain, 2021

"This is true of many commercially published scholarly journals, for which “subscription” no longer signifies a regular delivery of paper volumes that, if canceled, simply means no more are forthcoming. Instead, subscription is for ongoing access to the entire corpus of journals hosted by the publishers themselves. If the subscription arrangement is severed, the entire oeuvre becomes inaccessible."

#JonathanZittrain, 2021

"Of course, there’s a keenly related problem of permanency for much of what’s online. People communicate in ways that feel ephemeral and let their guard down commensurately, only to find that a [social media] comment can stick around forever. The upshot is the worst of both worlds: Some information sticks around when it shouldn’t, while other information vanishes when it should remain."

#JonathanZittrain, 2021

"So the internet was a recipe for mortar, with an invitation for anyone, and everyone, to bring their own bricks. Tim Berners-Lee took up the invite and invented the protocols for the World Wide Web, an application to run on the internet."

#JonathanZittrain, 2021

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/06/the-internet-is-a-collective-hallucination/619320/

#internet #web #TimBernersLee #protocols