hyalineskies

The German-language novelist Franz Kafka died exactly one month before his 41st birthday of chronic tuberculosis. The now-famous writer asked his best friend Max Brod to burn all of his remaining, unpublished works, including unfinished novels, notebooks, and other assorted papers, for reasons commonly unknown. Dora Diamont, a Jewish kindergarten teacher and Kafka’s lover, only partially executed Kafka’s wish on his behalf; Brod eventually published many of Kafka’s unfinished works, including the novels Der Prozess (The Trial) and Amerika (originally titled Der Vorschellene or The Man Who Disappeared.) Both of these novels, originally subject to destruction, have had very much different fates than intended.

Amerika, the lesser-known of the two novels, has seen very little widespread acclaim; it has been perceived as missing the disorienting, abstract feel of Kafka’s later works such as Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis). This most likely occurred in part due to Kafka’s inspiration for the novel: E.W. Tedlock Jr. stated in a 1955 book that Amerika was a “sheer imitation” of Charles Dickens’s earlier David Copperfield, a derivative of sorts meant to portray “above all the method” of the great English writer, never intended to have the haunting, oppressive complexities of his later works.

It was work like Die Verwandlung that gave Kafka some acclaim, and his posthumously-published Der Prozess has gained similar fame as a representation of what we now call “Kafkaesque.” Kafka’s protagonist Josef K. is led through the judicial process for an unknown crime, eventually leading to the point where Josef has become so powerless under authority that he cannot even kill himself when presented with the opportunity. Since its publication, Kafka’s Prozess has been made into two English-language films, found its way onto the cover of a Belle and Sebastian album, and has served as both a classic literary text as well as a cultural icon worldwide. All of this remarkably influential, popular content, however, was supposed to have been erased forever.

Christopher McKinstry was, at the least, considered to be one of the most brilliant researchers in the field of artificial intelligence. The Winnipeg-born computer scientist retired to Chile at 30 to operate the Very Large Telescope, an interferometer array run by the Eastern Southern Observatory. Simultaneously, McKinstry continued his research into artificial intelligence with a project dubbed Mindpixel. The AI idea proved popular commercially and academically; McKinstry’s Mindpixel was featured in Wired News, Robert Cringely’s column and on the BBC News website.

Mindpixel was seemingly ahead of its time; the system, launched in 2000, harnessed the attention spans of web visitors for short periods of time to get them to validate simple statements, such as “Does a cat have four legs?” The results were recorded, and the system became more intelligent through simple statistical inference. In return for participation in human processing, network revenue was paid back to users in terms of Mindpixel shares, with the top users gaining both a high rank in the Mindpixel reputation system as well as the most shares. Such human computation systems have become commonplace now, with Carnegie Mellon’s ESP Game and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk Web Service, the ESP Game being created in 2003 and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, much closer to the Mindpixel system in terms of payout and operation, in January 2005.

Like Kafka, though, McKinstry was plagued by real emotional conflict: McKinstry had caused an armed police standoff in Toronto in 2000 after attempting to commit suicide. A blogger who claims that he was close to McKinstry said that McKinstry “tended to strike people as strange, with some odd movements of the hand and face.” His continuous mood swings continued until 23 January 2006, when McKinstry committed suicide by gas in his Santiago apartment. Three days prior, McKinstry had left two suicide notes on his Blogger Blog.

The Mindpixel site, originally residing at www.mindpixel.com, as well as his blog, were edited by an unknown source; his 80,000-instance data, all of Mindpixel’s raw database, and much of Mindpixel itself vanished nearly overnight. Only posts from May to September 2005, most of which are cross-references to press releases or AI news, are available on his blog. A hobbyist resurrection of Mindpixel exists at its original location, but neither a supposedly-new version of Mindpixel software or it’s original 80,000 instances of released data are available for download. The Mindpixel project, unlike Kafka’s works, largely died with its creator.

McKinstry’s online fate required no final requests of removal or destruction; mindpixel.com would have simply vanished left unattended by its maintainer, overwritten by other data as the need for disk space on the mindpixel server grew (or as the bills paying for the server’s connectivity were left unpaid.) His computers, which most likely contained tons of unpublished source, are in locations unknown as well. While in McKinstry’s case most likely someone had intervened, be it McKinstry pre-suicide or a mysterious figure after his death, we are left with less from McKinstry due in some part to the nature of the Internet.

It is a mainstream notion that we are plagued with “information overload.” As creation costs get cheaper, the ability to create content becomes more widespread, and such content creation has been unprecedented in recent years. New content increasingly drowns out the old; the inactive are silenced by the active due to the very structure of our search systems. More relevant data is accessed more and given priority over all of the old, in many cases writing over abandoned content, with the new content existing for as long as someone pays to keep it there.

Had I died yesterday, this website would certainly still be running; my MediaTemple bill would keep rising on my credit card until my credit card was cancelled, at which point hyalineskies would go down. At that point, all of the things on this site accessed hundreds of times daily would simply vanish. It would no longer exist except in the rare instances where someone may have saved it to disk and on a CD-ROM backup I have safely tucked away. Even then, my CD may begin to decompose within a few decades. My password-protected computers would most likely just have ended up at an estate sale, my incomplete projects being overwritten by a fresh install of OS X. With trillions of other pieces of existing content and billions of people making new content each day, most of hyalineskies would probably cease to exist by February 2008.

Some of my most meaningless content, however, would live on; social networking profiles, free blogs, message board posts, and even Flickr generally maintain service for inactive users for years if not indefinitely; even Chris McKinstry’s photos still exist on Flickr. This content, too, would be overwritten in time, destroyed in the cycle of bits and bytes. The cost of reusing magnetic or otherwise rewritable media is effectively zero; this generally cannot be said for more traditional forms of record keeping such as paper, where — as I have conveniently omitted — I have a handwritten archive of a majority of hyalineskies articles I originally wrote away from a computer.

We do end up, though, with an interesting question: What if Kafka had written his works on a MacBook, all of his data sealed away in disk encryption? Max Brod and Dora Diamont, neither of them in particularly geek-oriented professions, may have simply given up hope of resurrecting the incomplete works of Kafka, the challenges of hacking the system seemingly impossible. Der Prozess would have been a Pages file on a small Fujitsu hard drive, a special orientation of magnetic alloy. One of the great literary works of the twentieth century could have been overwritten by a sixth grader’s report on their cat or an RSS feed of celebrity gossip had Kafka’s MacBook been sold off during the sale of his possessions.

Given the social ways content exists today, we would not only have lost Der Prozess but also its derivative works, much the way we may have seen Kafka never write Amerika had it not been for David Copperfield. Today’s documents experience the “mashup effect” on a level never seen before, and the destruction of anything with “viral” possibility effectively destroys the exponential tree of content created in response. Loss of good content causes a much larger social effect than its initial deletion on a scale much more measurable by examining social media phenomena today.

What can we do about this? There doesn’t seem to be much, frankly. As more and more content saturates the Web, the lesser, it seems, the median social value of created content really is, to the point of where the value of content seems to follow the same Zipf pattern we see in other quantitative results regarding user-generated content. Setting aside social value, it is also impractical to archive this content on a large scale; the Internet Archive tries on some level but certainly does not preserve a majority, let alone a decent plurality, of the content available online. Further hurting the chances of posthumous or otherwise abandoned Internet content is the sheer archival life of such content itself, much of it drastically less than what we have seen previously. While content loss from societies is certainly nothing new, it, too, has been accelerated by the information age.

Aside from what we can do, there is the much more realistic question of what we will do, to which the answer is almost nothing. Aside from a small niche of archive hobbyists and intellectuals, most simply find content preservation irrelevant in their daily lives. After all, what good is a potentially viral piece of content to a corpse? That is the economic question that will usually dominate, to which the answer is zero. That content, though, may have extreme social value in the tree of derivative works created from or inspired by it. It is a painfully, recursively ironic decision that we personally make, given that Kafka himself, in one of his unpublished surviving works, tells us “Im Kampf zwischen dir und die Welt, sekundiere die Welt.” (In the fight between you and the world, second the world.) I can think of, yet again, a rather surreal adjective I could use to explain this alone.