All of Our Media May One Day Vanish

If we’re not careful, the digital dark age might be closer than we realise

What if I told you that a large amount of the art, entertainment, and information that you consume today might not be available for your children or their children to enjoy? Consider your favourite books, movies, music, games, and other forms of media, and think of yourself as the last person who will ever get to enjoy them. It’s a bizarre notion, right? What could possibly happen to, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Dark Side of the Moon when these things exist on every hard drive, DVD box set, or streaming service? Well, you should press play again and cherish what you have because it’s more threatened than you think.

Just this May, Crater, a science fiction family film by the producers of Stranger Things was released on Disney+ to generally extremely positive reviews. If that doesn’t ring any bells but it sounds like something you might be interested in, then you’re out of luck because you’ll probably never see it. After streaming for just under two months it was yanked for reasons that could only be determined if you had access to Disney’s opaque internal business documents.  

Most probably, according to those in the know, the reasons are tied up with the complex world of Hollywood accounting, where Disney’s accountants can do magic tricks with the books—take a film that isn’t performing as well or taking off as fast as hoped, charge themselves a huge licensing fee to stream their own content on their own platform, refuse to pay themselves that fee, ditch the film and write the entire thing off on taxes. Just like that, a movie that has been in production since Obama was president is gone after seeing the light of a screen for just seven weeks.

It probably hasn’t been erased or destroyed—at least not yet, not until they decide there’s no immensely profitable way to release it. That’s the fate that met 2022’s Batgirl, the latest spinoff from DC’s Justice League slate which starred Leslie Grace, as well as J.K. Simmons as Commissioner Gordon and Brendan Fraser as the villain Firefly. The movie was finished and ready to screen when Warner Brothers got cold feet over it not living up to the same level of exhausting three and a half hour long trillion-dollar cinematic mega-spectacles that we’ve come to expect from movies like The Flash, so to the horror of many fans and the entire cast and crew of the movie, they destroyed the film rather than ever screen it.

I really wanted to see this!!

There are many examples to pick, from HBO wiping clean its slate of original animation to Netflix cancelling, swapping out, or permanently altering its films and shows. We are entering an age of media purge—a kind of book burning, in a sense, but not necessarily for ideological reasons, just because we don’t have the inclination to keep it. And for reasons associated with the nuances of capitalism, in many ways actually disincentivised to keep it.

In preparing for last week’s column which I dedicated to the late actor Julian Sands, I had to watch or rewatch a number of movies. Some of them I owned already, some I was able to stream, and some I had to purchase. One of them, 1993’s Boxing Helena, I pirated.

Generally speaking I don’t engage in media piracy. As a creative myself I believe that people should be compensated for the work they do in creating something where the creation has its cost in both money and time, and where time is also money, and life in general costs money, and costs time. If I could have found a way to pay the people responsible for Boxing Helena, then I would have.

Living in Australia makes it a lot harder to find movies than if I lived in the USA. Not every film comes here if the market isn’t considered lucrative enough to bother with a distribution deal. DVDs can’t be imported if they’re region locked, and all of the dozen or so streaming services combined still feel like they cover one percent of the films commercially available at any one time. I keep a list of films I really want to see on JustWatch that will alert me if any of them ever become available on a streaming service, but a lot of them really don’t look too likely.

I just think it’s a clever title, okay?

There was another movie I planned to watch for that piece. It’s called Hotel, a 2001 film starring Sands alongside a high level ensemble including Salma Hayek and John Malkovich. Sands and Malkovich had a very close friendship for the remainder of Sands’ life so I wanted to see their chemistry. But I didn’t see this movie because I can’t see this movie. It’s not streaming, it’s not showing. I can’t import it, I can’t get a torrent of it. I checked the WorldCat world library catalogue and found one copy in Australia that I could borrow if I fly to another state. I will never see this movie, it is forbidden to me.

You might think, sure, but this isn’t the same thing as media being lost or destroyed. There are copies of this floating around. But media that is completely inaccessible does sort of feel like it might as well be lost. And inaccessible media is at the very least on its way to being lost. It has one foot out the door.

Why do we care when media is lost? It’s not like we’re bored, like we don’t have enough to watch or read. But it’s not what we lost that matters so much as the fact that we lost it. We lost part of ourselves. We are hoarders, it is in our nature.

The idea of lost media does emotional damage to us. It’s an affront, almost, to our story as a species to have pieces of it, no matter how small, erased from our cultural memory. Often we don’t even know what we lost—the knowledge that we lost something is enough. We analogise great cultural losses with the most well known and tragic of such losses—the burning of the Library of Alexandria—not because there was much of significant importance stored there, which there wasn’t (it was a glorified warehouse stocked with cultural overflow, more useful as a symbol of prestige than an actual library) but because we know there was something there.

Ironically some really cool art was made because of this though

It’s tempting to believe that, as sentimental as we are to the works of our own species, the preservation of our art and our collective learning is one of our utmost concerns, but that isn’t the case. If it was ever the case then the sweet spot for that was probably sometime during the media rich landscape of the last couple of centuries, sometime between the Industrial Revolution and the internet. An explosion of new media in the 19^th century accompanied a raft of new techniques to preserve what we had.

But preservation necessarily lags behind the technology that it’s preserving. Sometimes too far behind. And that’s how you get tragedies like a huge chunk—the vast majority, in fact—of the early history of film being gone forever.

As our media output grows ever vaster at an increasing scale, though, the question of how we can possibly keep everything becomes more difficult to answer. We don’t have an infinitely expanding Library of Alexandria. And, as much as it seems to defy logic, we are in a lot of ways becoming worse at long term preservation techniques as time goes on.

The speed of digital evolution isn’t necessarily a straight line. New forms of digital media don’t always evolve slowly but sometimes so dramatically that they bear little resemblance to what came before, leading to the backward incompatibility problem. Even if the media still physically exists there may be no way to ever convert it into something you can view.

Think of it this way: Got any old family movies still on their original VHS tapes? You better get around to finding someone with the technology to convert those, because eventually we won’t have any machines left that can read those tapes, and we won’t remember how to build them. We won’t even be able to reverse engineer them. They’ll be as useless as a dead language with no Rosetta Stone.

Every time we invent a new, better, file format or preservation technique for media, we need to undergo the process of converting every single piece of media humans have ever produced into the new format, and we have to do it before the old format dies. We once spent an exhausting amount of time recording old documents onto microfilm before the paper degraded, and now we’re in a race against time to convert the microfilm to digital storage before they disintegrate through vinegar syndrome. Before this process is complete, we will probably have new file formats that preserve information better but are incompatible with the ones that we are using now. So we need to repeat the process.

And while this is all going on, our generation of media is speeding up, exponentially. More to preserve, less time to preserve it. This is the Sisyphean nightmare that Vint Cerf, one of the pioneers of the internet itself, knows all too well.

As that link will eventually go dead due to the very process I am describing, here’s a quote.

And the more our media is condensed, stored, and centralized digitally, the more it is left to the whim of singular companies and individuals to make executive decisions about the worth of what they’re preserving, and those decisions will be based in money—business has veto power in all things over collective human will.

Like a lot of geeks of my generation, I have a large DVD collection, but those will only be any good to me as long as computers still come with disk drives, which may not be long. If streaming fully eclipses physical media as a business model then it may not even be possible to own movies in the near future. Those movies and shows will exist for only as long as it remains profitable to someone to keep them in circulation. The second that profit motive disappears, that movie gets the Crater treatment.

Social media preservation is a concern, now, when it comes to ensuring we’re able to document history into the future. Huge chunks of the internet are already rotting and vanishing as we fail to preserve them.

I’ve written before about the Pointless Waste of Time forums which contained a huge amount of written history about the evolution of the internet in the two decades that it existed, but which were unceremoniously deleted when the owners of the website didn’t want to pay for the space to keep them. But that is nothing in comparison to the immense amount of historically important documentation that exists solely in the reams of data that make up Twitter and Reddit. The hand written words of presidents and world leaders. It will all completely vanish into nonexistence the moment those companies go bankrupt, which they both almost certainly will, and soon.

Imagine now all of our books, films, and music preserved in a vault of hard drives somewhere, and some Elon Musk figure, who lacks the sentimental affection for any media he doesn’t personally care for, decides that enormous swaths of it aren’t worth the storage space that could be put to use serving his own mission that he decides for humanity. With one keyboard stroke we could lose Charles Dickens to make room for more of Tucker Carlson’s fat stupid head.

It's a puzzle that we will have to keep figuring out for as long as we exist, because there will never be a permanent solution. For as long as we as a species churn out media, there will always be occasional fires in our Library of Alexandria. Cherish what we have at any given time, because it will always be vulnerable, and pour one out for those of us who really wanted to see Brendan Fraser as a Batman villain.