If hundreds, thousands of years from now, and some of them may still be interested in history or archeology, their business will not be easy. Tand has always been the creation of human hands, as Fontane wrote, but the chats on WhatsApp or the photos of Laura’s wedding sometimes don’t even survive the move to a new cell phone.
Even those who go on the supposedly safe side with storage in the cloud cannot know whether their descendants are willing and able to pay the fees for it. But the clay tablets with the Gilgamesh epic (3000 BC) will still be legible when the last bit on hard drives, USB sticks and all that electronic gossip no longer knows whether it is one or a zero.
But man would not be man if he did not try to give his modern creations a touch of eternity or at least uniqueness. That too has been lost, everything has become reproducible. At most live events convey something of this, even thousands of cell phone recordings cannot capture these experiences in their emotionality.
For most people, the code of computer programs is as illegible as the writing of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Computer code can also be printed in books or, if necessary, carved in stone, but its value is only given as bits and bytes that make a difference.
Tim Berners-Lee has achieved a lot with his code. This became the World Wide Web, that part of the Internet that he made usable for the masses. The fact that this code, although freely available on the Internet, but specially summarized by the master himself, now as a digital good, as a non fungible token (NFT), was auctioned for more than five million dollars at Sotheby’s, may show how great the longing for the unique in all that is reproducible. Even if it only consists of ones and zeros.