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0 pointsrsj_hn4y ago0 comments

Acid free paper is a big improvement, but it's not gonna last 500 years. It's expected to last 200 years.

Archival acid-free paper -- paper with cotton added to it -- can last up to 1000 years, but be prepared to pay $2.50 for 1 page[1], so a 400 page book will cost you $1000 for one copy, just for the paper in the book. This type of archival paper might be useful for important contracts or deeds, or legal documents.

But then you have to worry about ink. Normal ink will break down as well in 1-200 years, so you need archival ink. This boils down the difference between pigment and dye based inks. Dye based inks are more expensive but more resistant to UV light.

In the end, light, heat, water, will destroy everything.

The way to make something last is social in nature -- building long lasting institutions and cultures that value your website and archive it. These must be able to preserve themselves, which means traditions that forcefully apply to successive generations.

It is not a technological problem, but a social problem. However liberalism is completely unequipped to solve this problem, because in order to create something that outlives you, you must bind future generations to some course of action they haven't agreed upon yet. So a liberal society cannot have long lasting institutions or traditions, it always eats itself -- there is another trending hackernews topic about Jefferson being cancelled. Well, of course Jefferson will be cancelled. So will Martin Luther King. So will everyone else. Absolutely nothing can last in a liberal society that believes moral progress is possible -- e.g. that children can be more moral than their grandparents. If you look at durable societies of the past, they all believed that the grandparents were wiser and more moral than they. That allowed them to preserve traditions and texts. The contingent that believes the opposite does not preserve texts, they burn them/cancel them/or otherwise try to erase them.

So once you stop thinking in terms of "what is the best way to do X" to "what is the best way to make sure my mechanisms of doing X will last", then you end up with completely different solutions for the same problem, because the social technologies of preservation are often the exact opposite of the social technologies of progress and improvement.

So no, your website is not going to last 500 years.

[1] https://www.archivalmethods.com/product/archival-paper

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8 comments · 5 top-level

idiotsecant4y ago· 2 in thread

I'm not sure the latter argument summarized "in liberal societies cultural values change, so no information can be preserved" makes sense. We certainly can access certain culturally preserved texts that are thousands of years old with a pretty high fidelity, even when those texts may contain positive depictions of acts that are considered morally abhorrent today (slavery, genocide, murder, rape, etc) or simply physically falsifiable worldviews.

rsj_hnOP4y ago

When you are talking about millions of works, you need to approach it statistically.

That we have some works preserved does not mean that we are succeeding at preserving works in general. Nor is the fact that we have books preserved by previous generations a guarantee that the same books will be preserved by current and future generations.

So one way to think about this is that society has a big junkyard into which it throws documents. And sometimes, people do some archeological digging and reconstruct portions of some documents or bring them to light and popularize them, bringing them out of the junkyard, with a bias towards those documents that reconstruct whatever fashions are happening in that society.

That does not mean that the society as a whole is preserving documents well, even though you will always have some ancient texts available, and people are still mining the junkyard.

Moreover once we move to information stored online in the present climate of account deletion and deplatforming, we are again reconstructing the ingredients for a dark ages as mass deletion of online data is a lot easier than burning individual books. Many of the manuscripts we have were literally pulled out of ancient trashheaps or were written over by other texts. That's a lot less likely to happen with modern technologies.

idiotsecant4y ago

You weren't originally making a statistical point, you said:

>Absolutely nothing can last in a liberal society that believes moral progress is possible

Which is clearly not true.

In any case, toward the more general claim that this post is making, which I will summarize as "Authoritarian societies are statistically better at preserving works in general" this is also demonstrably not true in the wide statistical sense. They are just as likely (if not more) to deliberately discard works that disagree with the general ethos of that society. Heresy is not really a big deal in a liberal society, but it will get some books burned and practitioners slaughtered (reducing social transmission of ideas) in a autocratic theocracy, for example.

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Apocryphon4y ago· 1 in thread

Cancelling is an online-driven social phenomenon that has existed for- a decade, maybe? Rather odd to view all of human civilizational progress through the lens of one overexposed, extremely online trend.

KronisLV4y ago

> Cancelling is an online-driven social phenomenon that has existed for- a decade, maybe?

Ignoring the tone of the parent comment, i don't believe that this subcomment is necessarily correct either.

Sure, "cancelling" is a modern term, but i'm pretty sure that exile to any degree and censorship of the exiled people (or worse) have been prevalent throughout the history of humanity, be it reporting them to the communist spies for non-communist rhetoric, claiming that they're guilty of blasphemy against the church or declaring them a witch.

Thus, regardless of where any of us stand in regards to the political or ideological climate, viewing preserving information for a long time as a social problem definitely has some merit to it. For example, just look at this from almost a century ago: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/stalin-photo-manipulation-1...

topynate4y ago

I believe you have misread that table. The prices (which depend on size) are all per package of 100 sheets. So you can reduce that $1000 to $10 as an order of magnitude estimate.

That's still rather expensive just for paper, but it might make a nice project, as a one-off, to print and bind a book to that sort of standard.

Robotbeat4y ago

Microfiche can last 500 years. So can engravings in nickel, which can be read with an optical microscope:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-Rosetta

freosam4y ago

> This boils down the difference between pigment and dye based inks. Dye based inks are more expensive but more resistant to UV light.

I think it might be the other way around: pigment-based inks are opaque particles bonded to the paper, and so even if their colour changes/fades they're likely to still be legible. Whereas dye-based inks, when they fade, can completely disappear. (One advantage of dye-based inks is that they have a larger gamut.)

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