Transience and Eternity

Introduction

You may have noticed that the footer of this website says, "All is for eternity.". Despite starting this website on 19 August 2022. Yet, it is only yesterday (05 April 2024) that I realized I never defined my concepts of "Eternity" and "Transience". Ooops. Well, better late than never I guess.

Eternity is usually defined as "something lasting forever". My concept of "Eternity" is a bit of a misnomer. According to science, the heat death of the universe is probably a thing. As such, there is a high possibility that nothing is actually eternal. My belief essentially boils down to "things should last as long as they can".

Transience is usually defined with "something that lasts for a short amount of time". I heavily associate it with change. Although one could argue that the concept of change is actually an "eternal construct", its output undeniably create transience.

Now, if you are American I can already see you picturing me as a hardcore Christian who owns guns, read conspiracy theories too much, is a Linux evangelist and supports conservative politicians. First, I am a Canadian and I am not a hardcore christian, I do not own a gun and I don't really care about politics. This just the perspective of someone born in the year 2000 who is somewhat concerned about current technological trends.

Unnecessary Transience

To start, I would like to draw a distinction between "transience" and "unnecessary transience". I am not opposed to the concept of change. Change in a vacuum is not inherently bad. What I am against is "unnecessary change". Quick examples of this which are known is "planned obsolescence", "software update that breaks everything", "e-waste", "preventable data loss", "Game shut downs". I hope you are starting to get the idea.

My experience with Eternity

While my life lack in transience in many aspects, I will only focus on technological matters now.

According to the earliest records, I first used a computer in 2007. It was a school and it ran Windows XP. Next year, we got our own computer inside the house (which also ran Windows XP). Said computer sadly got fried by lightning in 2010 and was replaced by a Windows 7 machine. Although this is technically what I would consider "unnecessary transience", it did not bother me as a child - probably because my computer usage was somewhat limited back then.

In December 2016, I got the opportunity to have my own computer. It came from a small store where a single man was building "gaming pc". The man gave me a choice: Do you want Windows 10 or Windows 7? Considering I had used Windows 7 for 6 years now, the choice was a no-brainer for me.

As time went on, I happily used my new computer. I was hearing all sorts of bad things about Windows 8 and Windows 10. In my mind I was like "why the hell would I ever switch?". All that I wanted was still working perfectly fine. As long as RuneScape, Steam, Discord and web browsers worked, all was good.

In 2022, many people - both random internet users and close IRL friends made the remark of "why the hell are you still using Windows 7 in 2022?". I don't remember the specific answers I gave, but the fact I still run Windows 7 today should tell you all you need to know.

And thus, I had learned the axiom "Don't fix what is not broken" while the rest of the world was complaining about how bad Windows 10 was.

My experience with Transience

Back when I was a kid in the early 2010s, I played Club Penguin. This game was a MMO - meaning it relied on servers to function. Around 30 March 2017, I learned that Club Penguin would shut down. I was like "oh well". I think I tried to log in one last time (and could not because turns out accounts were deleted after 2 years of inactivity) and then moved on with my life. I was likely not particularly sad about this as I had lost interest in the game around 2013 - the time when Disney started to use the game to advertise his other intellectual proprieties (i.e the Marvel Takeover party).

Now, from a game preservation perspective, I believe that this MMO was very easy to preserve compared to everything else. The game was essentially a collection of flash files (.swf) that could be downloaded and run locally. In other words, 90% of the game source was accessible. Though I did not know that at the time, I did play many private servers in my youth. I suppose that knowing the game was replicable likely contributed to my near-total apathy toward the shutdown announcement.

During my teenage years, I used to watch YouTube on my Nintendo 3DS. In fact, my Nintendo 3DS voided any reason for me to get a phone until 2021.

One day the app started getting glitchy; it would crash only 2 minutes after opening it. In retrospect, I think it was a RAM issue, but hard to know. On 30 August 2019, the app officially shut down. This was a bummer, but I just moved on. It's not like YouTube itself had shut down. Later that year, I got a Switch and watched Youtube using it.

Still during my teenage years, RuneScape 3 became my favorite game. Although I had tried RuneScape before in 2009 and 2011, it is only 2014 where I started to really enjoy the game.

The year was 2018. The makers of RuneScape had just announced that they would shut down RuneScape Classic (not to be confused with Oldschool RuneScape) on 06 August 2018. Now, truth to be told I did not care a lot for RuneScape Classic. I logged once, but that was just to get a cool cape; I did not even bother to finish the tutorial.

Still, I appreciated the fact that the three major versions of RuneScape were available to play. At the time of the announcement, I was part of the RuneScape Wiki team. So, I decided to give a helping hand at preserving the game. I was mostly a "transcribe game dialogue" guy, but I would sometimes help to test certain behaviors in game. I had no real attachment to the game, I presume I just did this out of curiosity to observe what RuneScape looked like.

After the game shut down, I moved on with my life. I understood that the same would happen one day with RuneScape 3, but at the time I was not really concerned.

Three years after RuneScape Classic had shut down, I suddenly got the urge to preserve RuneScape. To this day I still have no idea what was the catalyst for that.

I won't go into much detail because that deserve its own article (it is quite the story) but the short version is:

• I created the RuneScape Preservation Unit, a Discord server for people that understand the mechanisms behind RuneScape.
• I gathered said people (Around 50 people got invited)
• People "refused" to help me preserve (record server interactions) of the game because it is a mammoth task and they have better things to do.
• I get a bit sad.
• Me and other key members create the RuneScape Archive to gather old game data. This is nice but not really what I envisioned.
• I successfully prototype a method to preserve the game
• I realized the enormous amount of manpower needed and the toll it would have on my mental health.
• I quit RuneScape preservation before I lose my sanity

Needless to say, that this experience really opened my eyes to the concept of transience. That being said, RuneScape is a bit of a weird case. I can hardly define it as "unnecessary transience" because it had valid reason to rely on a server (unlike many games).

Our Transient World

Our world is now surrounded by unnecessary and/or dubious transience, some examples include:

• Digital Right Management (DRM)
• Streaming services
• Cloud gaming
• Many online services
• Planned obsolescence
• Smart appliances

I am thankful to have been born in the early 2000s. The only real transience I experienced in my life are pretty much limited to websites, online service and a selection of video games.

I can only imagine the sadness a kid growing now will experience when his favorite piece of media will be lost to the sands of the time due to unnecessary restriction. Want to watch an obscure Netflix show you like as a kid? Gone. Wanna play (insert game as a service game here)? Gone.

I think what really gets me the most is that it doesn't have to be this way. Digital data can be duplicated at will. The only reason for a piece of media to disappear now is either due to artificial restrictions or it being extremely obscure.

Interoperability & The Computer Miracle

When I take a look at technology, there is one class of device that stands out to me the most. The personal computer of the tower kind.

Those devices are highly interoperable. Don't like Windows 10? Well, you can just pluck in another hard drive with Linux on it (or overwrite the existing installation if you wish). There is no need to buy another computer! Your screen broke? Well, that screen you found at a thrift store will probably work (unless it is physically broken).

I am not quite sure when computers became this interoperable. Looking at the hard drive I own, only the oldest use an IDE port. The rest is all SATA. Truth to be told I am not sure how this miracle happened. All I know is that in the 80s there was zero open standards and everything under the sun was proprietary. I have yet to research how that happened, but I believe what we use now is called the "IBM pc" standard or something. Anyway, I am glad this happened.

Sadly, non-interoperable computer are still a thing. The most obvious example is video game consoles. I believe Mac computers and laptops also fall into this category, but I am not entirely sure.

Just take a moment imagine for a moment a world with high interoperability. Imagine a world without DRM. A world where all your social media conversations can be downloaded in a text file. A world where MMORPG are required to release their source code once they shut down by law.

Well, sadly reality is not quite there yet. Although our world is still non-interoperable, we still have the power to free ourselves from those artificial chains.

Toward Eternity

Ever since June 2022 I have studied the question of unnecessary transience. Here are my notes and recommendation:

• I recommend only using tower computers or other interoperable device
• Ensure all your software/applications can be run without internet. You should also ideally ensure they can be run in a clean virtual machine if possible (to check for third party library requirements).
• Ensure all your data is in interoperable format or can be opened with open-source software.
• If you really need to archive non-interoperable files, ensure you properly preserve the program to read them.
• Do regular backups of your data. I recommend at least 3 different mediums (i.e an external HDD) in your control.
• Avoid games that use DRMs and online only.
• I recommend avoiding playing MMORPGs.
• Ensure any online service you use can be run through a browser, avoid everything that is app only like the plague.
• Use as few online services as possible.
• Download every media you can to your local archives (i.e Youtube videos you like).

Alright, I think I have said all I wanted. Phew, that took a while to write. I might go into more details about my backup strategy in the future. If you are interested in specifics for any subject mentioned, you can email me your questions

In the end, it is all about what you control.

Written by manpaint on 06 April 2024.