And by long term, I mean after the end of technological civilisation, as explored in my earlier post here.

Richard Heinberg’s Post-Carbon Institute blog has a post about the importance of librarians and archivists in trying to keep cultural knowledge alive after the power goes out.  It’s a bit doomladen, even for me, but he is utterly right in saying that “digitization represents a huge bet on society’s ability to keep the lights on forever.” Read his post here.

The excellent Low Tech Magazine has an article looking at the monster footprint of digital technology, pointing out that digitisation absorbs far more power than we like to think, and that the seemingly inevitable rise of digital resources has only been made possible by cheap energy.

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