Robin Sloan Quotes

TheIinternet is a timeless void - you put something in there, and it's there forever and loses a lot of context.

When you die, nobody pays your hosting company, and your work disappears. Like that.

There's a lot of things lost in the Digital Age.

The idea that you can somehow erase the Internet is silly.

Recording - once something's done, it's done, there's not much you can do about it. It's out there and you just have to pray to the gods.

With our blogs and tweets, digital cameras, and unlimited-gigabyte e-mail archives, participation in the online culture now means creating a trail of always present, ever searchable, unforgetting external memories that only grows as one ages.

Most of us still haven't grasped the fact that everything we commit to the digital space - not just our public blogs and broadcast tweets, but every private text message, email, and voicemail is likely to be stored and accessible. Forever.

Most of the stuff that people look at on Quora today was not written in the last month. You write something really good, and maybe it's the definitive answer on the Internet for the next 10 years. Maybe it's only a year, but not like a tweet, where it's only relevant for a day or a week.

Snapchat changed that perception of deleting something as bad. Online, typically you delete something if it's bad or if it's really embarrassing.

We're now seeing email that people thought they had deleted showing up as evidence in court. You can't erase email. As that becomes more commonly realized, people will be a little wiser about what they type.

Digital media are biased toward replication and storage. Our digital photos practically upload and post themselves on Facebook, and our most deleted e-mails tend to resurface when we least expect it. Yes, everything you do in the digital realm may as well be broadcast on prime-time television and chiseled on the side of the Parthenon.

I'm a person who always wanted to turn my life into an archive. Social media made my dream come true.

It seems odd that at the beginning of the Internet, everyone decided everything should stick around forever.

People should think about e-mail as something where they are archiving their lives.

The printed word will be around long after many of our digital creations are gone, either because books don't require monthly hosting, and blogs and websites do... or because the languages and platforms for which a particular digital creation was published will become obsolete.

If we don't record our own history on the Net, it will disappear.

Your next SMS will probably be around longer, and remain more legible, than your tombstone. For, unlike your tombstone or even your mortal coil, your texts may be worth something.

For the longest time, the way that I had understood 4chan was this idea that the lack of an archive made the content really ephemeral, and it took me a while, but I finally realized that that's just totally wrong.

Gone are the days when your indiscretions at university were recorded in a roneoed college newsletter of which there is only one copy left tucked in a filing cabinet at the back of a library. Today that same college newsletter is online, accessible by the whole world now and forever.

People want chat histories. They're a permanent testimony of a relationship.

I've got all my old laptops going back to my first, which was so fancy at the time, in '93 or '94, but now it's just like a doorstop. One day I said, 'I'll go in and get all my old documents in there.' The cords and the wires are all gone, the discettes you need are gone. Meanwhile the little electrons are starting to wither away.

If you put something online, it's essentially there forever. You don't know who's kept it, who's screenshotted it.

Sadly, it seems as if there is no longer any real history. Just momentary reactions to events that disappear like sky-writing with items like Twitter, texts, Meerkat, Snapchat, and Instagram.

Of course, authors can still burn their manuscripts - but once something is out in the world, especially if it ever saw the digital light of day, it's harder and harder to call it back.

As digital culture becomes more tied to the success of the platforms where it flourishes, there is always a risk of it disappearing forever.