the Onda

Just finished reading Charles Stross's latest novel, Glasshouse (incidentally the first fictional work I've actually finished on my Kindle), which is a pretty entertaining sc-ifi novel. As usual with Stross, it is full of great science that makes you wonder what life will be like in a universe where we can back ourselves up, travel faster than light, and change physical bodies at will.

My favorite thing about this book though was the way in which the author throws in all of this running commentary about what life was like in the late 20th century (the glasshouse is a prison set in our time period), and specifically this particular bit on why the 21st century marked the beginning of a dark age before the "acceleration:"

"We know why the dark age happened," Fiore continues. "Our ancestors allowed their storage and processing architectures to proliferate uncontrollably, and they tended to throw away old technologies instead of virtualizing them. For erasons of commercial advantage some of the largest entities deliberately created incompatible information formats and locked up huge quanitites of useful materials in them, so that when new architectures replaced old, the data became inaccessible.

This bit ought to be music to any of the digital pack rats that read this blog. A while ago I thought I had this problem licked— I'd periodically burn gigabytes of files to CD, then DVD, and finally the cloud (through services like Amazon's S3). Recently though I was looking for an 8 year-old tarball of some source code from a previous life (Memora) and spent 2 days searching only to find that it was useless because of how utterly impossible it would be to re-create the build environment.

As we throw away old technologies— be they build environments, old OSes, or even web services that have lost their way (I've been thinking a lot about this as it pertains to Flickr given the recent exodus), we might stop to think just what it would take for the kind of virtualization that would save us from Stross's dark ages.

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