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[The following article was published in the American Post on August 1, 2287 A.D..]
I am Jeff Grammaticus Johnson, a member of the Technology Preservation Society. My job is to organize digital media.
Nearly all digital media made before the Great Collapse of 2222 had been lost. Luckily, there were those who kept local backups. One of the goals of the Technology Preservation Society is to acquire hard drives, back up any digital media found on them, and preserve it for future generations. In the past this meant venturing off into dangerous territory, but now we receive drives as part of generous donations. I go into those drives, extract the digital media, organize it, and then put it on our servers where the material is then shared with the rest of the world.
My workflow is as follows. First I make sure the drive actually works. More often than not, the devices we obtain are either broken beyond repair or the data is irrecoverably corrupted. Those get thrown into the recycling bin. If the data is still intact, I start sifting through it for audio, video, image, and text files.
Most of the images we find are family photos. We preserve those because it provides a glimpse into ordinary life long ago. We also keep any unique photos of prominent historical events. What we do not preserve are obscene, pornographic, or blasphemous images. Those are immediately deleted. The same goes for all other media of a similar nature. If it is profane or wretched, it is consigned to digital oblivion. The photos that remain are then sorted by the year in which they were taken. This information can be obtained through the image’s EXIF data. If this data is missing, then I use my best judgment to determine the precise year of the file’s creation. Memes are the worst in this regard. Some are so old that their origins are a mystery.
Sometimes we find collections of e-books, but most of the text files we come across are financial reports for companies that ceased to exist long before I was born. Many of the e-mails we dredge up are equally mundane. Video files are where things get really interesting. We mostly find family videos which, like the family photos, show us what ordinary life was like back then. We often give out copies of these files to movie studios who then use them in documentaries. Most of the movies and TV shows of the past were destroyed during the tyranny of the United Earth Government under the pretense that they were "problematic" and "bigoted." A large portion of the remainder were either looted or trashed in the mayhem following the Great Collapse. After the Great Flood of 2266, almost no Hollywood media was left. We were lucky to find that film archive in the Hutchinson Salt Mines. Several media pirates aided our efforts by donating their hard drives to us. It is also through their work that we were able to preserve a massive collection of videos that were posted to long defunct social media sites. It’s quite strange. Digital pirates were smeared as evil thieves for many years, but they were the only ones who took media preservation seriously.
Music is in a much better state of preservation. Pirates have shared MP3 and FLAC files with each other long before the Great Collapse, and some have kept their hard drives around long enough for us to preserve their contents. They were even kind enough to do all the organizing for me. Of course, we still come across hard drives with haphazard music collections. It is often during those cases that we encounter music files with no metadata. It is then that we go through the effort of finding out who the original artist was, what the song was called, and which album it belonged to. This seems like a nigh impossible endeavor, but thankfully, there were those out there who kept local backups of music information web sites. They archived many other web sites as well. We copied those and now people can browse these ancient web pages at their leisure.
Software is in the worst state of preservation. Most computer programs, especially video games, were proprietary, which means the source code was never made publicly available, which means it’s impossible to run them without intense reverse engineering. Complicating matters further is that many of the programs from before the Great Collapse were designed to run on this bloated mess of an operating system known as Windows. We here at the Technology Preservation Society use CathoLinux, our own custom Linux distribution. Getting a Windows program to run on a Linux system is a nightmare. Furthermore, there were video game companies from centuries ago who actively resisted any attempts at preservation. They shut down rom sites filled with collections of their old games while at the same time doing nothing to make these games available on official platforms. They did this because they did not want to compete with themselves. It is for these reasons and many others that the majority of video games and other software made before the Great Collapse have been lost.
So how do I organize this media? Let’s start with music. I organize it by genre, then by band, then their releases are sorted chronologically. If an artist combines multiple genres, then I sort them according to the most prominent element in their sound. For example, if a band plays a combination of power metal and thrash metal, and the thrash metal element is more prominent than the power metal element, then I put them into the thrash metal directory. Films are organized by genre, then by subgenre, then by year of release. Fiction books are organized by the author’s last name, then their works are sorted chronologically. Non-fiction books are sorted according to the Dewey Decimal System. Video games are sorted by console, then they are sorted alphabetically.
Does this work ever get tedious? I would be lying if I had said no. Staring at white text on a black background for hours on end takes its toll. When my eyes grow weary, I read the scriptures and pray. I also exercise myself by going outside and tending the monastery’s garden. The commoners call this "touching grass."
My job is to organize digital media. May the Lord be satisfied with my work.
"All whatsoever you do in word or in work, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, giving thanks to God and the Father by him."
-- Colossians 3:17
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