"The Tyranny of Print" has a nice ring to it, but mediums that give the creator more control over appearance+behavior are going to lend themselves to crafting more compelling experiences.
Sure, not disappearing in 10 years (or whenever the original server goes poof) would also be nice, but it's of little benefit if no one ever sees the thing in the first place.
And disappearing is the default, natural state of things.
If I see some people playing music on a corner and return the next night to see they've left, I may be wistful, but it would be silly to argue "playing live music is broken and we should fix it".
If you think of web sites as performances put on for a limited time by the server, it doesn't seem so terrible that they disappear after a while.
> And disappearing is the default, natural state of things.
Books, clay tablets, scrolls, engraved stone, to which humans owe their entire knowledge of their premodern history, seem to have put up pretty well against entropy. The same is not the case for information disseminated in a controlled manner from privately owned servers.
> If I see some people playing music on a corner and return the next night to see they've left, I may be wistful, but it would be silly to argue "playing live music is broken and we should fix it".
> If you think of web sites as performances put on for a limited time by the server, it doesn't seem so terrible that they disappear after a while.
Thankfully, the generations who produced and preserved knowledge on paper, clay and stone before the onset of digital technology - that is, every generation of humans that has ever lived, except ours - did not think of books and libraries as throwaway pamphlets. And it would take more than an arbitrary interchange of modes of cultural production to argue that we should be doing otherwise in the technological circumstance we find ourselves in.
The "tyrants of the server" are not thinking of server-centric aggregation and dissemination of as a performance put on for a limited time: they are betting on it as the future of all human literary activity. Google doesn't want to read you a paragraph, take your money and say goodbye; it wants to swallow all the world's books and information, chop it to tiny pieces, store and own it forever, and extract the maximum profit from each tiny piece, without having you pay a penny. And it wants you to come back for more. The persistence of the server-centric model of content dissemination is not an accident; it is dictated by the political economy of the web brought about by the Googles of the world.
"Books, clay tablets, scrolls, engraved stone, to which humans owe their entire knowledge of their premodern history, seem to have put up pretty well against entropy."
Only the ones that have survived. For every book or tablet we have, there are certainly tens of THOUSANDS of which every copy ever published has been lost - most of those are ephemera that wouldn't mean much to us anyways, but the lost also include things that would be nice: the majority of Livy, any of the original source material for the Gospels, etc.
Even considerably more modern material has been vanishing at a significant rate; for instance, most of the output of the silent film era has already been lost.
The mental model of web browsing and bookmarking is: "If I see it, I can get to it again." There's a partial feeling of ownership. "I've read it, so I should be able to refer back to it later."
Nobody (at least, no sane regular person) reads a webpage and thinks "I have a time-limited license from the originator of this content to consume the material and only use it for their expressly condoned purposes."
The vanishing content problem is like if books in your house randomly walked away just because it's the "natural state" of things to disappear.
There should be room for a spectrum of stuff online, from evanescent to permanent. It's one thing for the musicians on that corner to be gone the next night, but you do expect the corner to still be there. Online, it's depressingly common for even large bits of infrastructure (like GeoCities) to just go poof.
> mediums that give the creator more control over appearance+behavior are going to lend themselves to crafting more compelling experiences.
There is a difference between the creator and the server. Most of the content you consume is created by people who don't own the servers. Separating appearance+behavior from content source would help actual creators because they wouldn't have to worry about their host deciding one day to delete all their content because the service is being discontinued or the creator is competing with some business interest of the host.
> If you think of web sites as performances put on for a limited time by the server, it doesn't seem so terrible that they disappear after a while.
The problem is that the web is being used for everything, even things that can and should work like books rather than like live performances.
> If I see some people playing music on a corner and return the next night to see they've left, I may be wistful, but it would be silly to argue "playing live music is broken and we should fix it".
Actually, that's exactly what the inventors of (various) recording machines did. Something might have disappeared in one form, only to return in another. Just ask the Project Gutenberg people.
Sure, not disappearing in 10 years (or whenever the original server goes poof) would also be nice, but it's of little benefit if no one ever sees the thing in the first place.
And disappearing is the default, natural state of things.
If I see some people playing music on a corner and return the next night to see they've left, I may be wistful, but it would be silly to argue "playing live music is broken and we should fix it".
If you think of web sites as performances put on for a limited time by the server, it doesn't seem so terrible that they disappear after a while.