All the stuff Tumblr users intentionally wrote and published publicly, but none of their IP address logs and other incidentally collected information, is exactly what ought to be archived and preserved, in my opinion. This is in strong contrast to incidentally collected data including clear PII like IP addresses that many companies today are hoarding forever, when they ought to be ephemeral.
There's certainly value in archiving social media but I think it has to be balanced against the harms, instead of defending the practice with literal religious fervor and dismissing all criticism out of hand.
I agree that there is a danger that people may not realize how public and permanent the things they published to Tumblr were, or how dangerous it can be to do so (and I downvoted a sibling comment dismissing this danger). However, I think you and I have different threat models.
In my mind, archiving PII that is intentionally published is not particularly harmful because most lay people do, in fact, understand that their avatar, username, and by default, posts are public on Tumblr. They have had the opportunity to remove that information this whole time, and they still do, Archive.org removes stuff if you ask them.
By contrast, lay people have no mental model for what kind of information is incidentally collected nor how dangerous or benign it is. Certainly, lay people also can and do misjudge how public and how dangerous the things they intentionally publish are, but the gap is far, far less than incidental information. "Would you tell a stranger this" or "would you write this on a bathroom wall" are decent heuristics: the only difference in danger between text written on a bathroom wall and written on Tumblr is due solely to the potentially wider reach and possibility of even going viral on Tumblr. (Photos, of course, can also subtly compromise privacy in ways surprising to a lay person, but the gap is still much smaller than incidental information.)
In my threat model, that gap in understanding is much, much more dangerous than the intrinsic danger of PII. That's why I think that as long as Archive.org has a usable removal process, I think pretty much all the danger is in surveillance capitalism's collection of incidental information, not Archive.org's permanent record of intentionally publicized information.
Don't want it archived forever? Don't put it on the Internet. Seems simple enough.
There obviously should be ways to ameliorate your mistake, which is why it is absolutely critical that Archive.org has a removal process.
Yet such data is invaluable to historians and can give us a window in time through the eyes of people who lived that time. Having that publicly available data lost for all time would be an immense loss to future generations.
I'm sure in a few generations, some historians will study those archived porn blogs and get an insight on the evolution of humans' relations to sexuality that today's historians can only dream of.
Sure, but this leaves us a distorted view of history, where we have lots of details on the lives of "great men" and next to none on how ordinary people lived. Which means the vast majority of people who lived and died in that period end up written out of their own history.
Archaeologists spend a lot of time rooting around in ancient rubbish piles and cesspools, because these are some of the very few places where physical evidence of how ordinary people lived has survived. Nobody in ancient times would have nominated those sites as culturally important or worthy of preservation. But what we know of how ordinary people in those times worked, played, ate and drank comes largely from things dug up from them.
I'm not convinced that we should feel a compulsion to save all of that. Just because it's more practical to be a pack rat about digital content doesn't mean that, taken to extremes, it doesn't still seem like being a pack rat.
To my mind, this was the only known find of a vintage Atari 2600 game and its iterative development process. So, 30 years later, the only reason we had this snapshot is because someone found these chips and sold them at the flea.
The current state of digital preservation is abhorrent. Those roms would have taken up less than 1/4 of a 5.25" floppy, but the company behind them never thought to preserve that information or data.
Take2 Interactive republished BioShock in 2012. They couldn't find their source code. They didn't save it. They had to go machine to machine looking for it. The reissued game is not the same as the original.
As a society, we don't place any value on this stuff, but the potential value of it cannot be understood until the future has occurred. Letting it vanish is a disservice to the future. In the past, if a book was published, it wasn't going to vanish if the publisher went out of business, there would simply be no new copies.
In our digital online age, things vanish in seconds, days and hours. This is also a very different state of affairs. In the past we could not save everything, but everything didn't have a clock counting down from the end of the quarter over its head, counting the seconds until it is deleted.
The Library of Congress tries to save everything. Yes, libraries weed the stacks and choose items to host. This is due to space concerns: they can't host everything ever. Digitally, they can, and many host reams of microfilm and old newspapers because they can.
Libraries can, thanks to tech, now host every book ever, digitally, for very low costs. Copyright prevents that.
This is an unabated good. Leaving things behind and forgetting them is how you get Tulsa Oaklahoma, or the Armenian Genocide denials. We don't get to choose what the future finds interesting, and for the first time in history, we do not have to. Why in the every loving fuck would you worry about that?
Most likely, only for personal reasons. This is a humanity level problem. Your personal worries are irrelevant in 100 years when everyone who ever knew you is dead anyway. Geocities would be more interesting at that time, as a subject of study.
The bar - perhaps found accidentally - seems quite important in deciding what must be archived, and what probably shouldn't.
Releasing whilst the probably famous sender is alive is most often in the realms of to do damage, simply tasteless or paid for revelations in the gutter press.
(amateur digital archivist and data recovery hw/sw dev here, I find this stuff fascinating!)
There is plenty of evidence for the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and 9/11. That doesn’t really stop deniers or conspiracy theorists. When it becomes politically advantageous, spreading misinformation becomes weaponized and mainstream. A bunch of nerds saving some ROM dumps isn’t going to really change that.
Like the library of Alexandria it’s also quite idealist to think archive.org will be around in 100 years or more. Not that we shouldn’t do it... but the future can be unkind to even all modern technology.
I’m also not sure your Rembrandt example shows what you suggest it does. The average Atari 2600 programmer would be more equivalent to the hundreds of now unknown artists in Rembrandt’s time. The John Carmack’s of today will be remembered in detail with or without blanket archive efforts.
Maybe, just maybe, Rembrandt’s Status in our minds is a result of generations of people each seeing the individual value in his work. That is, each generation does indeed get to decide what future generations remember. Or at least it used to be true until the digital age.
Maybe the change is an improvement. But maybe not.
And libraries are the epitome of what you’re fighting against. They are by definition works chosen by humans based on judgment calls of their perceived value.
Let’s at least acknowledge that blanket archive efforts are a fundamental change in themselves and a departure from the human status quo for thousands of years. Then let’s debate whether the change is an unabated good.