We live in an age obsessed with speed. We stream movies at 2x speed. We microwave meals in 90 seconds. We judge our internet not by its reliability, but by its latency . And yet, we are psychologically unmoored by how fast physical things die.
In 2021, a small museum in Ohio lost its entire oral history archive when a cloud provider terminated a dormant account. Forty years of work. Voices of veterans. Stories of steelworkers. Destroyed in seconds. Not by a bomb, but by an automated script. destroyed in seconds
So, what do we do? Do we build in concrete and paranoia? Do we hoard every file on five different continents? Do we stop loving old things because they are fragile? We live in an age obsessed with speed
We comfort ourselves with backups. We tell ourselves that "the cloud" is a fortress. But the cloud is just someone else’s hard drive, and someone else’s hard drive is always 0.4 seconds away from total annihilation. We judge our internet not by its reliability,
When the smoke cleared seven seconds later, the cathedral was a pile of rubble no taller than a man’s waist.