Tim Wood Powell     The value of knowledge

Recently I saw an item noting the 50th anniversary of the commercial success of the analog videotape cassette. It’s ironic that this technology, relatively new in the ‘long view’ scheme of things, is now decades obsolete — replaced in turn by the digital tape cassette, the digital disk (DVD) with all its higher-definition variants (Blu-Ray, 4K, etc.), and now streaming.

Physical substrate technologies develop so rapidly as to compromise our ability to archive our histories — a basic feature (or is it a bug?) of our knowledge-based civilization.

The technology changes brought by the passing of time were not so evident to me as a younger man. As my personal history continues to develop, my ways of recording it change too — sometimes pretty abruptly.

My time capsule

The other day I opened a safe deposit box near my old office that I had forgotten about — and had not visited in two decades. It was an unintended time capsule from my former lives.

Among other things of value, I had stored my intellectual property — business writings and musical compositions, precious if only to me.  Of the five methods I had used to store my work, four were, for practical purposes, unusable by the time I opened the box.

My old Powerpoints were on a ZIP drive — a large physical cartridge that is long gone as a format. Some files I had burned to compact disk — which also contained some of my music. None of my half-dozen or so devices currently in use has a disk reader — though I’m sure it’s possible to find one if you really need to.

Most of my music was on analog tape cassettes. I tried one in my beloved (though long retired) Sony Walkman Pro. It sounded great, instantly took me back — until the long-neglected Sony started eating the tape. I also had some older stuff — live gig recordings from some of my college bands — on reel-to-reel tape, for which I long ago retired the player hardware.

Four strikes, I was definitely out. Except for storage method number five — print-outs of lyrics and chords to about 250 of my unpublished songs. Analog print saved the day — the kind I can see at the Morgan Library’s Gutenberg Bible, dating back nearly 600 years.

And let’s not get started on evolving hard disk formats — that’s a whole story in itself, from spinning platters in a range of sizes to today’s static flash RAM.

Information is static — knowledge is dynamic

I have long argued that while knowledge is organic and dynamic, data and information are static, as in the diagram below. That’s true under the best of circumstances — we generally don’t want our data to modify itself spontaneously without our intention.

But in the real world, data and information — though essentially intangible and ethereal — are stored on media (whether analog or digital) that are physical, tangible — and vulnerable.

This fragility stems from not only the technological obsolescence I’ve described here, but also the rigors of the physical world itself. Tape decays, plastic erodes, stuff happens — even to paper, which, of course, burns.

Does this matter?

Around 100 CE, the codex was invented — better known as the book — pages bound together at the side. This was a great leap forward, as it allowed random access — ever try turning to page 135 in a scroll?  This eventually rendered scrolls obsolete.

But, for another 400 years, books were ‘published’ by being hand-copied — when movable metal type became available. Some of the content was ’translated’ into the new format, I’m sure — but I’ll also wager it was a relatively small proportion. Substrate technologies evolve, tending to leave the content embedded therein as ‘orphans.’

But does any of this matter? Given that ‘what is’ changes much faster than our knowledge of it can — and that information follows knowledge in a distant third place, maybe this is OK. Maybe we should do a clean sweep of information every couple of decades or so — if, for nothing else, as a mechanism to keep our information base as fresh as possible.

I once wrote a book about technology that was largely outdated within about two years of being published. Given that it took me about two years to write it, that was a ‘useful shelf life’ of about four years.  I learned my lesson — and now write with much longer time horizons in mind.

A book begins its inexorable march toward obsolescence at the instant you you write it.  The publishing cycle adds further to the lag time between your knowledge of something, your documenting of it, and its arrival at its intended audience.

What is a library, anyway?

Library comes from the Latin liber — book, parchment, paper — and originally derives from the word for the bark of a tree that was used as an early writing substrate.

But a modern library is more than a collection of books. Last summer I visited Yale’s Sterling Library to make a personal donation to its collection — by way of being interviewed for a digital audio archive about New Haven club musicians (among whose ranks I once proudly served.)

The librarian doing the interviewing and curation described to me one its other recent additions — the purchase of some hand-written manuscripts by the classical guitarist Andres Segovia. Neither of those had anything to do with ‘books’ as such.

Books may even be deemed passe at a modern library. My first visit to the Yale School of Management’s then-new Evans Hall included a library tour — at which is was clear that there were no books in evidence. “Everything is digital now,” was the justification offered. I bit my tongue, having by that time written three published books, none of which was available digitally.

Do libraries have a future?

So, why do we need libraries at all? Are they merely expensive storehouses of out-of-date, hard-to-use information? Epistemic graveyards where once-fresh insights can rest in peace, undisturbed by the waves of evolving knowledge?

Is the ongoing cascade of media obsolescence just some normal self-cleansing process, so that information remains relatively fresh? Is it a natural, organic process — like shedding its skin would be for an animal?

With each technological advance, are there trade-offs we make, both explicitly and implicitly? What are these? What is gained? What is lost?

I have far more questions here than answers — but it’s worthy of serious investigation, I think.

Substrate is critical

In a recent series of posts Parallel Worlds, I describe the complex — and evolving — relationship between the physical world of atoms and things and the epistemic world of signs and symbols.

My KVC framework discusses the latter — but assumes the former. But it’s not ‘turtles all the way down.’ Our epistemic world rests on data, which in turn rest on two pillars — human labor (as discussed HERE) and physical substrate — chips, wires, electricity, and so on.  Stuff that wears out and breaks down.

By putting data on the opposite pole from value, am I implying that data is removed from the issue of value (however defined)? On the contrary, data is the foundation — the core resource that powers our organizations, our culture, and, increasingly, our entire civilization.

So data quality and provenance are mission-critical challenges. Bringing ‘bad’ data into your organization is like pouring sugar into your car’s gas tank — with the added challenge that it’s difficult to detect, even when something goes wrong as a result.

Substate is vulnerable

The vulnerabilities of substrate assets are continue to evolve. They are now targets, not only of hacking, but also of ‘kinetic adversarial activities.’ Data centers in the Middle East have recently been bombed — and submarines have been found scouting undersea cables that can be severed, like a digital jugular vein.

Data wars is no longer merely a metaphor — this now how our wars are waged.

Photos © Tim Wood Powell.  Lead photo is the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale.

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