Jason Fried, co-founder and CEO of Basecamp, writes a thoughtful blog over at world.hey.com.  What I like most about his blog is that’s it always about technology and our lives, even when it’s not really about technology—and even when it’s not crazy provocative. 

In one of his recent entries, titled “What’s Modern,” Jason compares his analogue wristwatch to his smartphone, and in doing so poses a question poets and philosophers have asked for centuries: what will last?  The essay is short and worth reading, and I’m not spoiling it by sharing my favorite excerpt:

I look down at the machine on my wrist today, and know that in 50 years my son will be able to look down at his wrist at the same machine ticking away the same way it ticks today.

I congratulated Jason on his essay but also observed to him that the questions he raised may be much deeper and broader than he suggests—with huge implications for both companies and human beings.

Here’s my case study:

I completed my doctoral dissertation on medieval literature in the early 1990’s. When I go back to my hard drive today to access those files, written merely 30 years ago, Microsoft Word will not open them.  Even though they were originally composed in Microsoft Word!

In a poetic irony, most of the texts I studied for my graduate work were written down on paper or vellum (animal skin) with quill ink pens 800 to 1000 years ago.  And yet they are still in great shape and completely legible today. The great Old English epic Beowulf was handwritten by two monks in England sometime around 1000 AD; it’s on vellum, and you can peruse it perfectly easily if you visit the British Museum today. (Provided you can read Anglo-Saxon.) The manuscript even survived a library fire in 1731.

Perhaps you own a DVD of the 2007 Hollywood film Beowulf —all-star cast and 71% Rotten Tomatoes rating (which is a lot better than I graded it).  How well does your DVD play today?  How well will it play 20 years from now? (Will you even be able to get your hands on a DVD player or optical drive 20 years from now?)

Jason’s question was “what’s modern?” A better one might be “what’s permanent?”  

Experts reckon that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are transferred over the internet every day.  But in spite of the vast amounts of information being created and shared, if the human race is still around in 200 years there’s a good chance we’ll know more about life in 1921 than about life in 2021. Paper journals are forever; TikTok is oh-so ephemeral.

My friends who are data scientists and CIOs are much better positioned than I to offer advice about how we can preserve our important data.  But it seems to me our technology is against us, even if we leave out science fiction scenarios.

Speaking of science fiction, here’s your obligatory geek closing:  

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. 

I hope what’s most important to you is never lost in time.  Meantime, anyone have any tips on how I can open my dissertation files?