it's gone, all gone...

3+ years worth of old emails, manuscripts, love letters, hate mail...
shit. catastrophic failure at my web-based email.
no, it gets better. I was trading a story (which rapidly turned into a novel) over a lot of those years with a friend who's (haha) on the same email server. so she probably doesn't have a backup.
shit. shit shit-
oh wait-
no, never mind. it's backed up on my hard drive. whew.
now i just i have to recreate my address book from scratch, and kiss everything else goodbye. no big deal.
The reason i bring this up, b'sides kvetching, is that the nature of the internet and the categorization of knowledge is becoming progressively more centralised. As you can see, I had a lot of personal data that was stored elsewhere.
And here's this story: Online File Storage.

It's amazing to me that all of us aren't backing up our important files online regularly. As far as I'm concerned, the only reason is because no product has emerged to fill this tremendous demand, with the right features and at the right price.

Bad idea. That's what cd-rs are for. And, like every other centralized service, the centralized data bank that has arisen is incredibly prone to attack. No, not the same old 'doomsday terrist hacker' story, goddammit, do i look like Tom Clancy? No. I mean, transcripts, reports and political data are all vulnerable to tampering. Shit, people fell for the Protocols of Zion. Now we've got Photoshop, and people Google for the truth. The present administration has already been massaging the official transcripts, ironing out anything embarassing, but people have been catching them at it. What if that system of information becomes more integrated?

On the other hand, centralization makes the whole tottering edifice vulnerable to collapse. It's old hat now to mention the blackout of a couple years ago, when we had a quick glimpse into a different world: the one with stars visible on a streetcorner. Something shaky and hungry in people's eyes. There was talk later on that 'maybe we should have more blackouts!' I haven't heard that suggestion made lately.
There's that too. Maybe we could use some cultural amnesia.
I admit, it's been kinda fun not having an email address for the past few days.
Sorry if I haven't responded to any of your emails.