In To Forget is an Ethical Act, a wonderful, insightful essay inspired by her efforts to curate an archive of her tweets, Emily Gorcenski observes—correctly, IMO—that the internet is disjointly fragile: some things last forever, and other things break suddenly and permanently. She says that it’s important to curate your digital presence, if not in real time, then certainly after the fact. And I agree, to a point at least. Some stuff really ought to be ephemeral, and other stuff ought to be preserved. The act of distinguishing between the two is what curation is all about. It requires reflection, intention, and vulnerability. Emily again:

I didn’t want to delete everything. Some of my posts have real archival value[…] I’ve[…] worked with biographers and historians who have already found them to be important and useful. So I wanted to be able to preserve those posts[…]

Revisiting every post came with emotional baggage. Many of the posts were cringe[.] Others were painful to watch, dredging up traumatic experiences or memories of loved ones who’ve passed. But reading them was also a unique and worthwhile experience.

I try to preserve just about everything I posted, however banal or however much I may find myself disagreeing with it now. As I said back in 2007, I try to respect the decisions of my past-self to publish things online, even when I’ve since changed my mind. Why?

Well, the self we write down, the self we publish—both online and IRL—is ultimately the only part of us that will survive past our lifetimes and the lifetimes of those who know us. And sure, Emily’s right: it behooves us to approach what we (continue to) publish with some amount of intentionality. But who am I, this present-day iteration of me, to retroactively override decisions my past self made about what should survive of her? That feels arrogant. The way I tend to, maintain, and preserve content published by my past selves feels more archival than curatorial to me. Sure, I do prune content here or there. But by and large, I let stand the decision of my past self to publish.

When it comes to what we put on the web, among these competing curatorial and archival tendencies, I’ve long sided with the archivists. This is much like the long-running debate between inclusionists and deletionists at Wikipedia. (I’ve not made a secret of my sympathy for inclusionism since at least 2008.) And the archivists, the inclusionists, ought to win. In a talk he gave many years ago, Jeremy told the story of how, in medieval times, anonymous Irish monks preserved many critical works of antiquity by meticulously copying them out by hand:

And yet, we know very little about these anonymous heroes. The minutiae of their day-to-day life was not preserved, although we are granted occasional glimpses. Every now and then, a scribe would add some observations of his own in the margins of a manuscript.

Here’s one:

My hand is weary with writing, my sharp quill is not steady, my slender, beaked pen juts forth a black draught of shining, dark blue!

And here’s another:

Pleasant is the glint of the sun today upon these margins, because it flickers so.

These are the real treasures: little dollops of trivia served up in fewer than 140 characters.

How wonderful for all of us here in the present that, in addition to the works they intentionally set out to preserve, some of their scribbles survived too.

What are your own scribbles, your own ordinary plenty, not worth much to you now but that someone in the future may treasure? What are you doing to preserve them? ∎

Many thanks to Eryn, Jeremy, and Tantek for their feedback on earlier drafts. In addition to categories marked up directly in the text, this essay is relevant to folks interested in data preservation, data, indieweb, social media, and Twitter.