OUR EVANESCENT CULTURE - Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels - page 86

original content while making it accessible to millions or billions of people today and in future gen-
erations.
At the same time, the very function of libraries is up for grabs: a presentation at the 2008 Amer-
ican Library Association conference reported in Library Journal suggested that libraries should be
“more and more a place to do stuff, not just to find stuff. We need to stop being a grocery store
and start being a kitchen.” 5 As libraries become multipurpose cultural centers (in many occasions
serving as informal daytime homeless shelters), one of their primary practical functions is the pro-
vision of free public Internet access, with computer included. Yet these new demands and functions
arrive at a time when funding for libraries is shrinking, as city and state budgets are downsized to
fit evaporating tax revenues.
Preservation of digitized knowledge can become a problem simply because of obsolescence.
Think of the billions of floppy disks manufactured and encoded during the years between 1980 and
2000: few of us still have working computers capable of retrieving the data on those disks. Physical
degradation is a threat as well, for both magnetic and laser-etched media. 6 But these are hardly the
worldwide information system's point of greatest vulnerability.
Ultimately the entire project of digitized cultural preservation depends on one thing: electricity.
As soon as the power goes off, access to the Internet goes down. CDs and DVDs become mean-
ingless plastic disks; ebooks become inscrutable and useless; digital archives become as illegible as
cuneiform tablets—in fact, more so. Digitization represents a huge bet on society's ability to keep
the lights on forever.
Without precious kilowatts, what would survive? Sculpture and architecture would persist. Pre-
vious generations of sound and visual media might be decipherable: old phonograph records could
still be made to emit music, given a hand crank, needle, and megaphone, and silent films would be
relatively easy to show. Books and collections of physical newspapers and magazines would fare
reasonably well for a few decades, but deteriorating acid-laden paper threatens the survival of about
85 percent of topics and nearly 100 percent of newspapers and magazines (ancient topics written on
parchment and acid-free paper could last many more centuries).
It's ironic to think that the cave paintings of Lascaux may be far more durable than photos from
the Hubble space telescope.
If the lights were to go out now, in just a century or two the vast majority of our recently recor-
ded knowledge would be gone or inaccessible.
How Likely Is Blackout?
If we could be fully confident that a more-or-less permanent blackout is unthinkable, then this dis-
cussion would be a purely academic exercise. Where might such confidence come from?
Two questions could help us assess the magnitude of risk: What has to go wrong for the lights
to go out? , and, What has to go right for them to stay on?
Here's a short list of what would have to go wrong:
• Failure to replace aging infrastructure. All knowledgeable observers agree that North America's
electricity grid system is overdue for a massive upgrade. According to electrical industry con-
sultant Jason Makansi in his 2007 topic Lights Out: The Electricity Crisis, the Global Economy,
What It Means to You , “You almost can't read a report on the US electricity industry that doesn't
decry the state of the nation's transmission grid.” The consequences of failure to invest tens of