Nothing lasts forever…
Today’s signal - that of over two million digitised academic papers possibly being lost forever due to bad archiving and defunct journals - reminds us that digital twins / doppelgängers / lovers / ghosts / islands (hey Tuvalu!) / chain’s etcetera are not really any less “immortal” than their flawed physical counterparts.
And let’s say nothing about the holes a 2 million paper gap could leave in the fragile chain of citation evidence academia is built on…
Everything is entropy?
How can anyone trust digital records as being immortal - let along immutable?
And what happens when the real originals (persons or paper!) are destroyed and only the digital ghost remains - when that ghost too vanishes - how can we have a shared future without a shared past to refer to?
Let us know!
Endings - and beginnings : https://fluxtrends.com/salon/leading-through-ending-and-beginnings-a-flux-trends-salon/
Millions lost : https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38438607/
Entropy everywhere