New Electronic Media: Here today, gone tomorrow...forever.

There are books that are older than the United States. We're all going to die one day, and all of us hope that something we leave behind will somehow endure. It's been a reality for centuries that this has in fact been achieved through reasonably reliable forms of information storage for thousands of years. While most of what was written on on stone, on wet clay tablets and parchment throughout human history has been lost, we're still finding what we've forgotten collectively, as a species.

Forgetting and remembering is practically central to the human condition. We're always in a state of amnesia, wondering, attempting to penetrate the great mystery, ourselves.

Because we're mortal, we forget. This is what worries me a little about the new electronic media and how poorly it archives. With one entirely new system and code after another being introduced onto the consumer market, only data migration is going to preserve a lot of it. (On the other hand, we might find one bright spot in the NSA's fusion centers--they'll preserve everything currently on the Internet.)

Any movie shot on HD video will have to be transferred to another code eventually, and so on. It's inevitable that some data will be lost along the way. A low-tech nitrate print can last a century, if properly stored. At least a decade ago, there were articles about how a digitized version of the Domesday book (a log of taxable lands commissioned by William the Conqueror in the 11th century) couldn't be accessed by scholars in the UK because the language of the files was obsolete. Without the process of data migration done at a specific stage, you cannot access the information. A hard copy book doesn't crash. A 78 RPM record doesn't crash. A CD doesn't crash, albeit that it's prone to a similar obsolescence. Now we've learned how to encode DNA with information. That might actually be a good route for archiving, at least so long as you can preserve its substance, perhaps keeping it in a biologically immortal medium.

But, have we finally begun to admit with our embracing of the new media that all of this is ephemeral, and that we're not leaving a legacy worth rediscovering behind? Has it come down to this?

The Tower of Babel: An exegesis in less than 1,000 words

Almost everyone living within the suffocating confines of Western civilization (and beyond, except the American Class of 2014) knows this tale, coming from a blurb in the Book of Genesis and other books: after the Flood, the survivors, sharing one language, decided to build a great tower to impress God. There was a unity of the people, really called "Shinar" in the Old Testament version. But God wasn't pleased with their work, and "Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." (King James Version)

Once the tower ended, so too did the city of Shinar, it was over, and the people dispersed. There was no more society, just brigands, raiders, chaos. This is about the fall of a civilization. But why would "God" do this? There doesn't seem to be any logical reason. "God" just wanted to show who was boss. What this is, is allegory, once again.

The Priests and Sovereign of Babylon would do these things, more specifically to the captive tribal Jews, but could also be expected to have done the same to anyone under their sway. The Tower of Babel is about human hierarchy and how people tend more towards unity naturally, but that hierarchy is also natural and that it has a tendency to divide. The Priests were usually the only ones who could read and write, therefore, they controlled language, and they knew how to corrupt its use through religion to render communication between ordinary people almost useless.

That's where we're at right now as a society, a civilization. The Priests--the economists, the rich, the managerial class, the media, rotten lawyers, the military officers, the pundits, and so on--have corrupted language to the point that things are unraveling, society itself is coming-apart. A great deal of it is owed to this manipulation of language. Hierarchy might be inevitable, but its dysfunction can be controlled, my take. I'm sure this isn't the first time someone has "found" this interpretation, I make no high claims.