Meditations On: Can We Preserve Knowledge... forever? [TED Radio Hour]

I just finished re-editing/re-copying journals that I wrote from 1985 to 1996. I started this project because I wanted to resurface short stories that I’d written over the years and possibly find inspiration for new stories. Not counting hand-written journals and using only journals written via computer, from 1985 to 1996 (plus essays written when I was at Fuller Seminary in 1982) I have generated 703,622 words. And this does not count all the handwritten stuff that I was scribbling into multiple hardcover notebooks or the essays and papers that I wrote while studying at LMU, Biola, CSUF or Pepperdine. Granted, there’s a lot here that no one would want to bother with (at one point easily half of the entries deal with various tech/computer challenges that I was working my way through). But I was more than amazed at how much I had written down, how much I had forgotten about over the years and how reading these stories stirred up all kinds of feelings in me, even over thirty years later.

Part of this project was because I was dealing with the realization that even though I have been writing and posting online for decades, those words, articles and stories were destined to disappear once I’m gone and no one is paying for the web-hosting or domain-name fees. My current website, josephbrucebustillos.com, has 2,709 entries. But all of that will go “poof” upon my demise and the writer in me finds that disagreeable.

Besides a sci-novel I’ve been toying with for a bit, I can easily see three or four novels coming from or inspired by the stories I wrote down as I was navigating life in Southern California in the 1980s and 90s. I originally wrote it all down because it was my way of figuring out what I was doing and what I wanted to be doing (not that any of those plans worked out).

Previously I would try to make all of this into a webpage or something online, but I can see now that there’s an expiration date on such things. And I would be better off to find a way to get all of this stuff into actual book form (both e-book and print), so that when I’m gone some can have a laugh and a cry because I was here and I tried to pay attention to the world and people around me. And the funny thing is I have another thirty-years of materials to work through. Spoiler alert: things did not slow down during the 2000s or 2010s or the ongoing 2020s.

So when this TED Radio hour podcast popped up in my feed about the struggles related to things either disappearing online or being in formats or operating systems that are no longer viable, I very much recognized the sound of that tune. Interestingly, when I was working through one problem with my blog hosting, the solution that I found was to store all of my media (images, videos and sound files) on the Internet Archive, thus reducing how much media storage that I’m paying for and (hopefully) links to those media resources won’t disappear over time. Turns out that the price of keeping our words and creations available to the public is not a small thing and can be quite expensive. Enjoy.

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