The game Cyberpunk 2077 has me thinking about the future.
It鈥檚 not due to the merits of the game itself, which I have not played. It was actually pulled from the Playstation store because it was crippled with bugs, making the game nearly unplayable for owners of the console. Sony took the rare step of offering refunds to anyone who wanted it and then stopping sales completely on account of the poor performance.
There are still copies of the game on disc, and those copies will soon be the only evidence of a complete debacle of a launch. A cautionary tale from the past pressed into plastic.
The digital version, however, is effectively wiped from history. This is one of the risks of the digital future, many things will simply cease to exist because they weren鈥檛 on the right server, they weren鈥檛 on the right hard drive, the CD-Rs and DVD-Rs they were burned to have decayed beyond use, the flash drives they were saved to no longer hold data. The danger of digital is that it鈥檚 easy for something to get lost.
Not that a physical copy of something was necessarily easy to keep either. Look at the sheer number of lost silent films, tossed out because the owners didn鈥檛 think anyone would care about silent film anymore with the advent of the talking picture, or wiped out in a warehouse fire because the film stock was particularly volatile. Look at every brick flour mill in Saskatchewan except the one here in Yorkton, brought down by fire, neglect or the wrecking ball. That one still exists is a small miracle.
But going all digital makes it easier to lose something than you expect. There are websites which were fairly major and important at the time that simply don鈥檛 exist anymore. There are things from five years ago that can no longer be accessed. I have some of my own work that isn鈥檛 there anymore, a victim of a hard drive crash and some poor storage decisions.
This is going to be a problem. If we want to know about the last major pandemic, for a relevant example, newspaper archives are vital. But if the websites go down, you鈥檙e going to lose a lot of information about the COVID-19 pandemic. And it doesn鈥檛 even necessarily take that long to do it, simply moving to a new online format could easily wipe our years of work if there is a compatibility problem.
What needs to happen is more archival of digital resources. Sites like archive.org do important work saving these websites so they don鈥檛 go down, but their system isn鈥檛 perfect - often images and links don鈥檛 work, because they weren鈥檛 able to save everything.
In the real 2077, it鈥檚 entirely possible they won鈥檛 have a clear picture of life today, because the evidence has been lost thanks to a low priority on archiving digital material. Hopefully we start to take it seriously, and ensure that future generations can learn lessons for us.
They might even want to play Cyberpunk 2077 to laugh at how wrong our vision of the future was, or at least the many bugs the game has.
