What is lacking cannot be counted
On storage
Something like half of all American movies made before 1950 are lost. No one my age has ever seen them or will ever see them. For films made before 1929, archivists have estimated that more than 90 percent are lost forever.
Something to ponder when you’re reading “best of” lists, perhaps.
This seems shocking—a gutting loss—but it’s probably a distinctly modern shock we’re feeling. The incredible storage of information—and the dizzying access to it—has changed our experience of culture so profoundly that it’s now difficult to even think outside of it.
Jenny Lind, the incredible nineteenth-century Swedish opera singer known as the “Swedish Nightingale,” came to the United States from Europe in 1850 for a tour organized by P.T. Barnum. She sold out large concert halls across the country, more than ninety shows for Barnum and more still on her own (adjusted for inflation, the shows raked in the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars).
The crowd would have read about her stardom as a performer in London, but the thing that is unfathomable for us is that they had never heard her voice before they splurged for their concert tickets. And after the show, they would never hear her voice again. It was just this once. The experience they had was their own, utterly new, to be revisited only in memory.
I have never heard Jenny Lind sing and you have never heard her sing. We never will. It is rumored that she did a very early phonograph recording for Thomas Edison, but that has not survived. Even if it had, it would have been of such low quality that it wouldn’t have told us much. Scholars today guess at the quality of her singing and performance based upon critics of the time, and the puffery of Barnum’s ad campaigns. But how could that tell us anything, really? The thing we want is to hear her sing. The thing we want is lost forever.
Our stories of Alfred the Great are robust in good part because a book about his life survived. There was also a book written about his grandson, Æthelstan, the first king of what we could plausibly call England. But that book did not survive—and so we can only imagine him with the faintest of clues. Roughly two centuries after Æthelstan died in 939 AD, William of Malmesbury, a monk and eminent historian, inspected the remains when his tomb was briefly opened. The great king was a slender man of average height, William reported. Along with the skeleton, according to William, the king’s hair remained: “It had been blonde in colour, and beautifully twisted into golden braids.”
Sam Kriss at the Numb at the Lodge Substack writes:
Around the turn of the century, the world contained around 50 exabytes of data: from the first Mesopotamian documents pressed into clay tablets, through five thousand years of books and pamphlets and diaries, to Shrek. Today, there’s around 65 zettabytes. A zettabyte is a thousand exabytes; an exabyte is a billion gigabytes. (Every word ever spoken by anyone who ever lived would come up to about 5 exabytes: a rounding error. One molecule of DNA contains about a gigabyte and a half: the instructions for building you take up about as much data as Shrek in 1080p.) Almost all the information ever produced by our species has been produced in the last few years.
But these calculations, if we are to give them any credence, refer only to what was stored. Digital storage is its unit of measurement. That estimate about every word ever spoken imagines the bytes necessary for a hypothetical written transcript (for one thing, think of all the information that is lost when you only have a transcript without audio). By this measure, I could make a video of a blank wall on my smart phone with more “information” than the lost book on Æthelstan’s life. We can calculate a song that was recorded in bytes, but the vast majority of times in human history that someone sang a song, it went unrecorded.
So much of the information that humans have created was never recorded and so much of what was recorded has not survived. It will be a very long time before the information that has been kept—what we call data—even approaches the amount that has been lost, if it ever can. Even now, with the full force of capital tracking our every forgettable utterance on the devices where we habitually dump every piece of information we produce—even now, we say things and write things and sing things that are not saved, that are lost. And so that pile gets bigger, too.
Imagine the impossibly vast library of every bit of information that has not survived. There is something sacred about that library that I cannot name. It is outside of history. It is not our legacy, but it is ours. Do the soprano notes of Jenny Lind exist? I insist that they do, even if they are irretrievable.
But it’s also true that the singing of Jenny Lind is fundamentally alien to me because I have no sensory experience of it, no tangible record. Because those sounds were never stored. As we lose less and store more, will history slow down? The knowability of our ancestors is influenced not just by the distance of time but changes in the ways that information is stored and preserved. Before written records, the ancients are ghosts to us, our histories speculative accounts of bones and the arrangement of stones. Once we have some remnants to read, we can at least try to stumble our way through the foreignness of the past. And our tools of navigation in that task keep getting better as our means of accumulating data improve and the records get deeper and richer—portraiture, the printing press, mass media, audio recording, photography, video recording, the internet, the cloud. The past becomes less foreign as we record and store more of it, in ever more detail.
Consider the few photographs you have of your great-grandparents, if you have any. Your great-grandchildren, if they should want it, will have access to documentation of your life orders of magnitude richer than even the chronicles of Alfred the Great.
Well, who knows. The future is even more foreign than the past. Historical records, however sparse, are easier to read than the evidence of the future. That evidence exists, or will exist (depending on how fundamental you want to get with the physics)—but it is invisible to us. We cannot access those files.
Better to stay on solid ground: Today, I am listening and reading and watching what is here. And I am not-listening and not-reading and not-watching what is lost. Here’s a song that got stored, perhaps forever, if by forever we mean the stretch of human history to come, as far as we can guess:
And here’s a song that never got stored, that is lost forever, if by forever we mean forever, whatever that might mean: