> There are tiers of conversation. Letters between famously literate people or during times of war have a value proposition on an entirely different scale to group chat messages.
Only in retrospect. At the time, it's impossible to know. We happen to have (some of) Picasso's childhood artwork. What might it be like if we had da Vinci's and Bosch's and that of the Lascaux Caves artists?
Destroying information now is expressing 100% confidence that nobody will have use for it later.
> It feels as if the point that I'm trying to make is that mindful archiving is a better solution than to just 'keep all the things' - for me, primarily, it's the far improved wheat / chaff ratio.
Depends on the cost of storage and retrieval, really. That was certainly true for, say, paper letters. But as the cost of storage and retrieval goes steadily down, manual archive selection becomes less and less worth it. Hoarding is only a problem IRL because it becomes expensive and unsafe. But my digital archives grow much more slowly than Moore's Law, so the cost to me of keeping all my email, photos, etc, is effectively zero. When I replace my backup drives every few years I spend about the same amount of money, and I keep having more and more space left over.
> Destroying information now is expressing 100% confidence that nobody will have use for it later.
Or an acknowledgement that it might have the capability to be used against you later.
Would you be happy for every word you ever said, in public or private, to be recorded and transcribed and searchable just in case it becomes an "important source to historians", or just as likely "an important source of parallel reconstruction data for $yourCountry{'nsaEquivalent'}"???
We never got a record of Pepy's bar discussions, only what he chose to record in his diary. I'm not sure we need my Signal messages stored for posterity either. Read my blog or Reddit posts, other stuff was intended and should stay private.
There's a good reason a bunch of interesting bars banned Glassholes...
Sure! Don't store them if you don't want to. I'm not sure how you take me as saying we should live in some sort of totalitarian fantasy you have constructed. I'm trying to help somebody understand why other people want to voluntarily save things.
Only in retrospect. At the time, it's impossible to know. We happen to have (some of) Picasso's childhood artwork. What might it be like if we had da Vinci's and Bosch's and that of the Lascaux Caves artists?
Or look at the way Pepys' diary serves as an important source to historians for the details of daily life at that time. Or how Pompeii's graffiti gives us valuable historical insight: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/adrie...
Destroying information now is expressing 100% confidence that nobody will have use for it later.
> It feels as if the point that I'm trying to make is that mindful archiving is a better solution than to just 'keep all the things' - for me, primarily, it's the far improved wheat / chaff ratio.
Depends on the cost of storage and retrieval, really. That was certainly true for, say, paper letters. But as the cost of storage and retrieval goes steadily down, manual archive selection becomes less and less worth it. Hoarding is only a problem IRL because it becomes expensive and unsafe. But my digital archives grow much more slowly than Moore's Law, so the cost to me of keeping all my email, photos, etc, is effectively zero. When I replace my backup drives every few years I spend about the same amount of money, and I keep having more and more space left over.