First, architecture followed the same trend as modern art where taste and beauty have given way to being original and conceptual. This results in very mediocre constructions. Paris attracts millions of tourists who come to admire its palaces and tasteful haussmanian style. No such enthusiasm for the modern buildings of Frankfurt. Not to mention the concrete-made brutalist horrors and other modern architectural “creations”.
Second, apart from the said brutalist bunkers, all modern constructions are designed for a very limited life (even infrastructures like bridges). I was visiting the Pantheon in Rome last week, a 2000 years old building which interior made of marble and stone looks almost new (after many renovations I am sure). What will be left of our glass and steel buildings? They are merely more durable than a mongol tent. The only trace historians will have of our civilisation is the selfies we publish on Facebook really.
People do flock to modern constructions, of course. Getty Center, Bauhaus museum in Berlin, Guggenheim museum, Gropius House, Sydney opera house, Oslo opera house — too many to mention! Not all modern architecture is worth admiring, but I for one consider many "brutalist bunkers" to be very beautiful, more so than the Pantheon.
There's lots of old architecture that was, once, "original and conceptual" (in the derogatory sense that I think you meant). It's just that these styles are so established that we don't recognize them as innovations anymore, and they're therefore not "weird modernisms".
All of the modern buildings you mention had an immense budget and were intended to be great buildings for generations. This doesn't always work but most of the time it isn't even attempted. The facades in the article front buildings that would never and could never be in that class.
"We have a street frontage, people like the look of it, keep it." Seems reasonable to me when the alternative is "Can an architect with a cost-minded budget do something people will like better?" Because that answer is usually no. (Why? Is a good question to ask.) If people don't like the street frontage, bring it down, have a go!
There is rather a lot of preciousness in architecture and it would seem a contempt for what people actually like is in evidence more often than it should be. UX testing on architecture, is that even a thing?
> All of the modern buildings you mention had an immense budget and were intended to be great buildings for generations.
So was the Pantheon. Survivor bias invites us to compare the great, high-budget buildings of previous centuries with the average, lowest-bidder constructions of our own.
The objection is not to innovation or originality per se. Nobody is saying that the first example of a concept is always terrible. It's merely almost always terrible. So if you want to produce a good built environment, you are almost always better off doing a humble minor variation on the thousands-years-old beloved tradition than attempting a monument to your own genius.
Then go to live inside one of those horrid abomination of buildings if you really like them.
From my point of view I can’t wait until someone finally decides to get rid of those brutalist monstrosities.
I never understood why Frankfurt is so fond of its unimaginative "cubes". Probably because of its inferiority complex to Manhattan, seen everywhere as "Mainhattan". I recently looked over at skyscrapercity and every single interesting skyscraper architecture was completely purged from initial proposal in favor of another bland cubed building. And their architects are proud of it. No curves like you see in Dubai or in Hadid works, no rich variations like in Shanghai, just stupid rectangular buildings maybe with the middle section rotated slightly to be "interesting". Like they were so proud of all the eyesores from 50s and 60s so that they would love to keep them forever.
I'd rather see a worthy older facade than to look at buildings that ever looked good only on paper and whose materials caught dirt after a single year and looked like from Borderlands ever since.
The last paragraph perfectly describes the monuments to human greed and excess that litter the skylines of the cities celebrated above. Dubai is precisely the wrong way to build a city; from nothing, with no predecent, as a means for the super-rich to consume to their hearts’ content in isolation.
To be fair, building with quarried stone is monstrously expensive compared to glass and steel so its hard to say if the builders would have bothered if they had the option.
Like my home inspector said when I wanted to convert a gas fireplace in my 1930s house back to wood: "if they had gas when this house was built no one would have chosen wood-burning fireplaces"
>The only trace historians will have of our civilisation is the selfies we publish on Facebook really.
Not sure why you think that A) Facebook would last, and B) that we will have the ability to retrieve and display "ancient" file formats even if those selfies survive on disk?
Actually if you think about it, books have survived through centuries better than physical constructions. There has been occasional losses, libraries burning or being sacked. But we have an incredible amount of antique texts even when the physical location of some of the cities they mention has been lost to time.
I assume it will be the same with today’s knowledge. It will be cheaper to preserve the storage of our digital life than to preserve the physical monuments we value the most.
That seems like a half-cocked assumption, because a discovery of a hard drive that's hundreds or thousands of years old is not going to reveal anything to anyone, unlike finding an old scroll will. At the very least, no if a civilization far into the future is able to read those, it will have maintained substantial continuity with today's world and will probably have a bunch of the buildings you imagine becoming ruins.
Bit rot is a real problem, but HDD are consumer products with very poor sensors. Assuming similar levels of technology Data should be recoverable for hundreds of years.
File formats in general are fairly straightforward at the bit level. Languages would be a larger issue except they are also stagnating with slower drift over time as population sizes increase.
On top of that we are still producing vast amounts of written material that is likely to survive. Net result future historians are going to have far more to work with than current ones do.
PS: Remember even 1 in 1,000,000 files would still add up to a lot of information. That said, encryption is likely to be a larger issue.
I hadn't even considered encryption, which like you said will be a large issue. It seems to me that that data is effectively gone unless we have some magic in the future that can defeat forward secrecy and post-quantum crypto algorithms.
I believe most of the ancient Roman and Greek texts have survived not because we preserved the originals but because of the numerous copies and translations that all the following generations made. I can only dream of the storage capacity of a hard drive (or whatever will have replaced it) in 50 years, I am sure that preserving a substantial part of this data will be a modest burden.
I disagree. I think some future civilization looking back in time 1000 years (for example) will likely only have physical artifacts to interpret, and it's likely they would get much of it wrong.
Imagine some future archaelogist making the first discovery of the shell of a old floppy disk. Without context, this would probably become the equivalent of "black ceremonial item".
I think we are nearing the point where someone will come up with a solid format storing bytes, in known encoding, for a quite long time. The incentives are certainly in place - libraries specializing in data storage (e.g for hollywood film master copies, etc), are to my understanding spending a considerable buck in updating theis storage scheme every so few years. Despite how many megahours of youtube data gets uploaded daily, I'm fairly sure there is a market for relatively low capacity but longterm viable storage once someone invents it.
There is such a thing as 5d memory storage, which I understand basically uses etched glass and is thus super mega stable, although I'm not too sure about the costs involved in heavy use for things like day to day archiving https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage
A market, maybe, but do you think it will be a big one? Where is the incentive to spend a lot of money on this problem?
Existing libraries already have trouble with low-quality books and film that doesn’t survive very well. Only the most important artifacts tend to be copied to archival-quality material.
Why would digital artifacts be any different? And where is the incentive to preserve this stuff? Look at how much bitrot there is on most web pages after just 10 or 20 years. Even setting aside physical bitrot, there’s plenty of semantic data loss that nobody really cares enough about to fix.
Finally, despite all the above, let’s say we do come up with a cheap and practical way to store digital data for very long periods of time. Unless it’s very compact, it will use an appreciable amount of energy and material resources to store stuff. Which tiny fraction of the massive tidal wave of digital content should be archived, and who gets to decide?
"And where is the incentive to preserve this stuff?"
To my understanding there are institutions including the library of congress whose main purpose is preserving information. Not all information, of course.
You must have a terrible opinion of archaeologists if you think that only a thousand years from now they won't be able to tell a data storage device from a cerimonial item.
No, I just don't trust that the corporate entities and governments that own the hardware storing vast amounts of non-public data to last for the next 1000 years, and that when they cease to exist, much of this information will be lost. I was being a bit hyperbolic with my quip about the ceremonial item. Barring a total collapse, you are probably correct that they would understand that it is a storage device. I guess it just depends on how likely you think it is there would be a new dark age within the next 1000 years...
The dark age really wasn't - not in terms of knowledge retention anyway. There was a decrease in population in europe which caused all sort of demographic maladies which caused the economic undevelopment we all associate with that period of europe, but the knowledge itself was preserved in books.
Yes, it's much easier to learn a foreign script than to decipher a forgotten disk format where bytes are nanometers in size - but given the vast utility computing devices provide us, we need to fall pretty deep and far from where the current historical development is taking us to forget computational devices as a civilization entirely.
If we have academia - and there is very little reason to think we won't - I'm sure there will be departments of digital information preservation who specialize in extracting cat videos (and probably digital physical simulacrums of the cutest cats) from the vast array of storage material our generation and the next will store.
The question is this: At which point will youtube seize to exist? If it won't there is no reason to think it cannot forward the data it stores to the future millenia. I mean, catholic church is over a millenia old with archives stretching as far. Is there some reason (barring some hollywoodesque global calamity) youtube could not reach the same age?
The constant churn of new video formats is one possible reason. If YouTube doesn’t convert all their old videos, they may become effectively unplayable (see for example how many 80s and 90s AV formats have vanished). But even if they do convert all their old videos, repeated transcoding could gradually turn them into mush anyway.
Those problems could certainly be avoided or worked around if YT takes sufficient care, but maybe they won’t have the right incentives to care continuously for the next 1000 years. I think it’s a much harder challenge than preserving paper and vellum artifacts.
>The constant churn of new video formats is one possible reason. If YouTube doesn’t convert all their old videos, they may become effectively unplayable
YouTube already does an encoding pass even with the most "perfect" h264 source. I wouldn't worry about video formats more than I'd worry about when YouTube shuts down.
We're going to need an incredible increase in storage density before we can think of doing a full replica of YouTube (I wonder if we'll ever have the processing power to de-dupe the amount that's uploaded).
Books that have survived into the present from antiquity did so (except in a few unusual cases like the Dead Sea Scrolls) not because the physical media survived from antiquity but because people copied them onto new media over and over again. Sometimes they even translated them into new languages -- many works in ancient Greek we only have today in Arabic translation. Assuming that we don't descend into a "Mad Max" style primitive society, I could see current computer data surviving centuries or millennia given how small current data will seem. It's like how storing ROM dumps of every Nintendo NES cartridge is a trivial amount of space today.
No, it's not, because we live in a literal information age, where a large portion of the population dedicates their waking hours to maintaining the world's amassed information, and you guys act like in the future people will just find random hard drives lying around and not have a clue.
Hello. The ancient world and the medieval world had scribes who spent practically all their time on text archival. Nevertheless many texts we know of and would like to read are lost and there are numerous texts only known because someone turned up a forgotten scroll/codex/papyrus somewhere.
Even the Old Testament (specifically the book of Joshua) makes reference to texts which are now lost and you'd think somebody would have cared to preserve those.
>where a large portion of the population dedicates their waking hours to maintaining the world's amassed information,
And they're doing a terrible job. Look at how fast link-rot makes websites useless. Look at how fast interactive websites built not even 10 years ago using modern technologies at the time (flash) are becoming impossible to run, especially if they depended on a server-side component returning data from a server that no longer exists.
It's already extremely difficult to get data off of a 50 year-old computer. Based on evidence so far, once the people die off that actually used them, it doesn't look good for retrieving information from them in the future if other hard drives are found.
Yet we can easily look at a picture developed 100 years ago and understand it without any special technology. Same with books printed 200 years ago.
The "information age" is only about generating and disseminating information as quickly as possible. Very little care is given to preserving for any extended period of time.
> Very little care is given to preserving for any extended period of time.
For some stuff, yeah. But there are specific archive-oriented system designs and storage formats made from the ground up for independent access. The hard working employees of national digital archives, museums, aerospace, and basic research see the importance of re-usable, re-verifiable, high quality data. "Digital Permanence" is an achievable goal [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_permanence].
My personal opinion is that we likely overvalue some of the fluff on YouTube, from a generational perspective... Losing things not forward-encoded to the sands of time like so many cultural touchstones before them is a natural part of the creative destruction of culture. 250 years from now, even a massive movement/moment like "Motown" will have been worn down to a nub of understanding. I think that's good, because it'll make room for new stuff. No one cares about our vacation slides ;)
Do we really? The last decade or so sure appears to be about reinventing wheels more than everything else, both as a generational motto and as an incentive for cloud businesses. Not only has preservation and forward compatibility of Web content been a non-priority, it's being actively worked against and cheered at with major content outlets using JavaScript-only sites, and many projects turning to JavaScript-heavy approaches even for content-oriented sites. We peaked around 2005 or so in our collective efforts to recognize the value of standards in information processing and preservation. Doing regular HTML sites is considered old-school and on the verge of becoming a forgotten craft with newcomers fixated to look at frameworks.
The irony is that HTML and SGML already operate at a higher level than frameworks and JSON, much in the same way that SQL operates at a higher level of abstraction than record-oriented ORMs.
Books and printed photos have survived so well because they do not have dependencies or require maintenance to be accessible to future generations.
Imagine if every book had a special bookstand that you needed to have to make the words appear. And books from different years or different countries use different bookstands. Sometimes a new edition of the book will be released, but it needs a new bookstand that can show this new version of the book.
> Books and printed photos have survived so well because...
They've survived so well because there's multiple copies of them. The higher the number of copies, the greater the chances that something will survive.
And we live in an era of contents reproduced millions of times in a fully automated way, without any effort and in negligible time. Even if the constant copy and distribution of material over the internet and in data centers should cease at some point in the future, just think of all the copies of books and movies and pictures that are presently sitting in dusty hard drives inside dead laptops or at the back of some drawer.
the main difficulties that people have running software from the 80s (mostly hobbyists, but in the future this could be professional historians; granted it’s an order of magnitude difference but still) is finding, and then getting it off physical media. hardware emulators do a lot of the work. where everything is “upgraded” to modern storage as it is in the internet, this isn’t an issue.
thanks to projects like archive.org, we are in one of the best documented, most survivable ages of human civilisation. digital data can be copied as many times as you like without degradation, so it won’t be “ravaged by time” like ancient inks and paints.
short of a major worldwide event like a global return to the ages of book burning (though even then there will likely be hobbyists that go against the grain and store TB of data for the future), i can see wikipedia, and huge parts of our current society immaculately preserved.
when you have access like that, reading and displaying our ancient formats won’t be that big of an issue for someone who makes it their life’s work to research and write the text “decoding the 21st century facebook”.
Digital data is actually more sensitive and difficult to preserve than analog data. Data rot is a thing and there’s no storage available that’s as durable as plain paper. There are books that have survived a millennium or more, yet my CDs from 15 years ago no longer work and the CD is almost dead.
That we can keep our data stored on Dropbox for a couple of years is nothing when you zoom out to millennia.
If you cared, you could have expected that lifetime for the CD-R you talk about. The effect that hit your discs, is not one that hits tape or BD-R (except LTH). It is actually more closely related to Flash, i.e. USB sticks/SSDs/memory cards.
The part about plain paper is not true, we know how to make anorganic storage that can be read out with easy technology, think just a small piece of glass.
I am specifically speaking about application of the Milleniata technology, i.e. sandwiching a thin carbon layer between glass, and then using a strong laser to change the crystal structure of the carbon layer, to something used like microfilm. If you compare it to a good, solid book, this should be at least as cheap as the book, likely cheaper.
The only real risk for normal BD-R is delamination, which should be comparatively easy to fix (at least if looking at the difficulties with creating a dye that neither rots nor returns to it's base state without a lot of light).
None of the high-density analog storage formats I know has a significantly better outlook that a single-sided, single-layer gold DVD (actual gold, not a dyed substrate). That one can only be made by either surface ablation or direct molding of the data into the substrate, which requires a mask to be made beforehand.
Short of something that eats the substrate, this should last _very_ long.
You're onto something interesting there. Another thing is the issue of giving our control of the data to facebook. Sure, I could occasionally download my own archive of personal data and then it could be made available, but what typically happens when something like Facebook is shutting down for good?
I assume all data would be deleted, unless something like one of those 'crusader' archive teams helped back up everything before it went down, however here it seems unlikely to happen because I doubt everyone's data could be given to an archive team for privacy reasons. It's an interesting problem.
> modern art where taste and beauty have given way to being original and conceptual.
Oh come on, don’t pretend those things are mutually exclusive. Between that and your dismissal of all brutalism as “horrors”, it’s clear that you just don’t have a taste for modern art and architecture, not that it is tasteless.
I don't think the Pantheon is actually much more durable than a steel-and-glass skyscraper; neither one would continue to stand without substantial human intervention.
Quarried stone lasts longer than steel and glass construction. For example, the glass is held in place by rubber gaskets which harden and crack in less than a century. Concrete exposed to the elements crumbles, and the rebar inside rusts.
But, they can be maintained. Changing the rubber gaskets every 100 years doesn't sound so bad. And glass will withstand water+wind forever, unlike stone. And it's easier to replace. And our steal&glass buildings might withstand earthquakes better.
In the end, I think what matters most is "maintainability": if the interest/ value of the buildings exceeds the costs to maintain it, they can live basically forever - humans will make sure of it. Otherwise, they all degrade eventually.
doesn’t have to be held in place by rubber gaskets. stone is pretty drafty! i’m sure you could make a steel, concrete, and glass construction that lasts as long as quarried stone and is still cheaper... the reason we don’t is not because we don’t have the ability; it’s just... why would we? what benefit does it serve?
in many ways having buildings degrade and get rebuilt is a good thing, because you can build them taller to account for city populations that expand enormously over the years, with modern upgrades that are more difficult in old buildings.
> in many ways having buildings degrade and get rebuilt is a good thing
To bring in an IT comparison: getting some app to 150% so that is never needs to be changed again, is one way to make software. Getting it to the relevant 65%, getting users on board, and maintaining and upgrading it as needs develop gets you 'live' faster, and saves bucket-loads up-front, and saves bucket-loads if you have to terminate the project at any point.
Lots of nerdlings want to tweak and polish until perceived perfection, costs be damned. Getting things out the door and into production is where value is created, though. It matters if Amazons new HQ is ready in 3 years or 15...
But there isn't much quarried stone in the Pantheon besides the entrance columns and some interior surfaces. Roman architecture is pretty much all about bricks and mortar (and in case of the Pantheon, lots of them). Many of the types of quarried stone they sometimes used for adding an expensive-looking surface are crumbling much faster than the brick.
In the case of the Pantheon, it's bricks and mortar supporting a cast concrete roof. Safe to say that if it hadn't been continuously occupied for two millenia by people willing to spend a lot on the upkeep of their churches, it would now be an attractive pile of rubble
Nobody is denying the importance of maintenance, but just keeping plants out and the roof from seeping will get you a long way. The most important effect of the use as a church was that it limited (but far from completely prevented) spoilification, and that (cheaper) replacements were installed when the original gilded bronze roof was taken. Much of what we intuitively assume to be natural decay is the result of mining disused buildings for materials how the damage inflicted by that then accelerates natural decay.
Amusingly in the context of this article, the current Pantheon has an inscription from the previous temple on that site, built probably 100 years earlier.
First, architecture followed the same trend as modern art where taste and beauty have given way to being original and conceptual. This results in very mediocre constructions. Paris attracts millions of tourists who come to admire its palaces and tasteful haussmanian style. No such enthusiasm for the modern buildings of Frankfurt. Not to mention the concrete-made brutalist horrors and other modern architectural “creations”.
Second, apart from the said brutalist bunkers, all modern constructions are designed for a very limited life (even infrastructures like bridges). I was visiting the Pantheon in Rome last week, a 2000 years old building which interior made of marble and stone looks almost new (after many renovations I am sure). What will be left of our glass and steel buildings? They are merely more durable than a mongol tent. The only trace historians will have of our civilisation is the selfies we publish on Facebook really.