Opposite of What You Can't Find on the Internet: What Cultural Artifact do you have that you should probably rip/scan/upload to archive.org for posterity in case no one else ever does?

It feels like Wm. Gibson interviews are something that nerds would have exhaustively transcribed, but I found a 90s-era Details magazine in the trash with an interview that's apparently neglected by the dead media data preservers.

Okay, I'll bite.

I have several issues of the fan-produced magazine DISC COLLECTOR, starting in the early fifties. This is a photocopied (mimeographed?) zine focusing on early country music records (78rpms.) essentially, enthusiasts published articles, discographical details, record lists (wants, offers for trade) and used it as a resource to build a record collecting community.

anybody have any scans of Zavtone magazine (gorgeous 90s cyberdelic rave magazine from sf / japan)?

It feels like Wm. Gibson interviews are something that nerds would have exhaustively transcribed, but I found a 90s-era Details magazine in the trash with an interview that's apparently neglected by the dead media data preservers.

― Philip Nunez

nothing... yet...

or maybe i do. who knows? ever since i first heard about the junked doctor who episodes i've been kind of obsessed with lost media, and i've come to the conclusion that it's all lost media, eventually. the question isn't _whether_ it's preserved, it's how _long_. how long people _care_, how long people _look_. there's no "posterity". all things must pass.

when i was young "lost" meant "lost", now it means "unavailable to download or stream". it's a semantic issue... whether or not copies of, say, _the new people_ are still in some archive, nobody can watch it. probably nobody's going to leak it like they did with _turn on_ or the margaret hamilton episode of _sesame street_. (i don't give a shit about _the new people_. i ran across somebody on the web who cares about it, on some site.)

thirty years ago, william gibson was a bigger deal. thirty years from now, maybe he'll be a bigger deal again. stuff that hasn't been ripped, scanned, uploaded, mostly it's stuff that isn't _desired_ right now. even in an age of mechanical reproduction, there are still questions of supply and demand. and right now, my feeling is that in general, people don't give a shit about what _details_ magazine printed in the 90s. a lot of print media is at ebb tide, in terms of media desirability. maybe in 30 years that issue of details will be worth as much as action comics #1. who the hell knows?

i also think that lost media isn't just about the media itself... it's about the context. the entire history of usenet - i consider that lost media. no matter what exists - i have no idea what exists - you can't read it in the _format_ we used to read it in, back in the day. you can't boot up nn or tin or whatever newsreader you happened to use and pull up a thread from the server. missing that context is missing a lot. any time i go back to that stuff it looks stupid and trivial and _mean_ and maybe it was, but i feel like there's something missing in the way we look at it nowadays. and maybe it's something as simple as being able to look at it through an interface that's not dogshit. or maybe there's more to it than that.

there's a context to data preservation, too... everything is a palimpsest, every time i remember something i'm creating something as well, and the same goes for media. there's this guy who writes a column, or a blog, or something, where he talks about obscure commercially unavailable media, and occasionally i go there and read it because some of the stuff he talks about is interesting, and i do that until he says something that reminds me that he's a transphobic piece of shit, and i stop caring so much about the hidden treasures to be found in dusty, forgotten corners.

i mean, i will always care about forgotten corners. i'm a hoarder, and i can't find half the stuff i have, half the stuff i'm looking for... i'm lucky that it's just a black box and not newspapers piled to the ceiling so that i can't move. but i still have a hard time finding stuff. _having_ things matters less and less to me as i get older. what matters to me is a thing's _use value_. it's hard to tell a thing's future use value, for me, at least. some things i got a good guess on. i'm not a prepper, but i stockpile the sorts of meds that don't expire. that could come in handy. most of the stuff i have is useless. nobody will ever look at it again.

there's a site called the digital transgender archive, and a friend of mine learned about it recently, and went trawling through it, and he's in there, something from 20 years ago. it's not much, but it's something. his name is _remembered_ in some form. what's _worth_ remembering from now? what's history and what's just people talking a bunch of shit? fuck if i know. i'm pretty sure i have delusions of grandeur. maybe somebody will want to look at some of the stuff i have lying around sometime, or maybe they won't.

it's an obsession a lot of people have these days, people make up fictitious lost media, and maybe some of that meta-lost media becomes lost media itself. labyrinthine backrooms filled with borgesian creepypasta. if you're going to preserve stuff, why stick to preserving stuff that already exists? why not preserve stuff that you _wish_ existed? why not create simulacra? do reconstructions, really shitty homemade animations of "the daleks' masterplan".

i'm not a librarian, i'm not an archivist. i'm barely even a _collector_. i'm a hoarder, and hoarding... you know, maybe some doozer will come along and eat it all, and the world will be better for it.

apparently i feel like rambling today. this is what i do to relax.

After watching this youtube video a few weeks ago, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP1fh9aLL1c
I learned that the majority of the episodes of this weird early Disney Channel show Dumbo's Circus are considered "lost" media, including one that I have on VHS tape from when I was little. So one of these days I should digitize it and put it online so other people can enjoy the time a tornado attacks Dumbo and his circus friends.

I remember internalizing the rhythms of commercial breaks because I couldn't stand them polluting my "perfect" recordings, but now I regret being so vigilant against them since it's really the cheesy local ads and station IDs that are the real neglected gems.

I recorded the complete set of six Stockhausen concerts off air on Radio 3 from his Music & Machines series at the Barbican in 1985. Still have the cassettes, haven't seen the concerts anywhere else.

Not William Gibson interview level, but I have several cassette demos of local high school bands that went nowhere that I'm disappointed no one has uploaded. I mean, these were bands whose serious fans could probably be measured in dozens (low hundreds, tops), but I was heavily into them, went to every show, listened to the tapes a lot, my teenage brain deluded that maybe our suburban Maryland town was going to blow up into the next Seattle. And yet, even the bands themselves haven't uploaded anything to Soundcloud or YouTube or whatever.

that's the weird thing of it, i've now reached the age where i can start saying "oh yeah, i remember that show! there are episodes of that missing? and people _care_?" i'm sure there were plenty of people who said that about doctor who in the day. "oh yeah! when it was in black and white! it was ok i guess. not sure how much of a loss those episodes are..."

disney channel back in the day was, well, it was shit. nickelodeon, i thought nickelodeon was great, although in retrospect their flagship show at the time being super fucking transphobic probably fucked me up some. but their shows were at least worth _watching_. disney was a pay channel and you were paying for nothing.

re: commercial breaks - ben minnotte of the oddity archive did an episode on '70s vcr culture based on one of the early fan newsletters/magazines called "the videophile's newsletter"... which i could _swear_ i read all of when the oddity archive video came out, but which don't seem to be around now? was i hallucinating?

anyway it's interesting because of the argument about whether to record commercial breaks, which being ephemera are more lost than the stuff people at the time were interested in. they'd trade tips on what was being broadcast where, hey, do you have a copy of _psycho_, where can i find episodes of _star trek_, anybody have episodes of _the prisoner_?

i have this book called "the encyclopedia of ephemera", it talks about all the stuff people collect that get lost... things like laundry tickets and... opening a page at random... "bastardy papers". shit, i'd collect bastardy papers. copies of papers made by certain processes... handouts made by mimeograph machines. people probably collect those. and that's the thing, you could digitize mimeograph copies, but _why_? the unique artifacts to those copies... you can't archive the _smell_ of a freshly made mimeograph copy. you can't archive the smell of inherent vice. when you start focusing on the artifacts of certain media, the way you can tell a u-matic copy from a vhs copy, eventually you start running up against the limits of archivism. and commercial breaks, i think they're an argument to be made that they're one of those media artifacts!

re: micro-scene tapes, I bet the gradual disintegration of Myspace effectively wiped out a generation of music, but fragments are probably still floating around somewhere on ilxors' hard drives...

re: the canonical physicality of ephemera -- to me that feels like a kind of primordial luxury/cosmic perk to would-be custodians who thanklessly digitize their hoardings.