Designing a clock around that is very hard because the clock is a physical machine that needs to physically last. Software is easier, because it's, well, soft.

I'm the developer who build their related Long Bets project (http://longbets.org/) and I think "data should be eternal" is a perfectly reasonable standard. That was certainly my goal in designing Long Bets.

If you start with that as a principle, I don't think it imposes particularly large engineering burdens, especially if you accept some potential degradation as a consequence.

For example here, instead of a "fuck you" dialog box, they could have imported the core of a presentation: text and images positioned on a sequence of frames.

An analogy is HTML. It's basically zero engineering effort to just suck the text out of a page. It is only modestly more effort to pull out some of the semantic markup, like headings, lists, and emphasis. And that's the part that really hurts to lose, not which precise shade of blue you used in your footer text.

Perhaps the ideas should be eternal, but the byzantine markup system? This is a major reason why the older I get, the more I prefer plain text wherever I can get it and open standards when I can't. Fancy rendering is just a variation on the drug dealer's bargain "the first hit is always free".