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Backups

May 17, 2006

Writing this in longhand, on an overnight horse-sit, in the journal book Nina gave me -- which has had quite a workout already with notes for essays, blogs, Squatters' Speakeasy, etc., all contained in one easy-to-find notebook. Easy-to-lose, you mutter to yourself. So do I. All our media are losable (loseable?) in myriad ways: papers get lost or misfiled or drowned in coffee, notebooks fall out of shoulder bags and backpacks, Windows crashes and in-process files disappear forever; hard drives crash and backups (if made at all) may be on diskettes that either have deteriorated or can't be read by newfangled hardware.

Not to mention there's a authorial tradition of losing the single copy of typed or handwritten manuscripts. T. E. Lawrence lost the first complete manuscript of Seven Pillars of Wisdom and had to rewrite the whole thing. As I recollect, he lost it on a train, but maybe I'm making that up because trains figure so prominently in the book. Anyway, following up on that particular loss introduced me to the losses of other writers. What amazed me at first was that none of them blew their brains out as a result; few if any even gave up writing for good. Several decades later I'm much more familiar with the Coyote nature of the subconscious. Some of those lost works were probably meant to go missing. Sometimes the only way to let go is to let accidents happen.

My attitude toward backups is somewhere between meticulous and blasé. I back up stuff I'd really hate to lose and stuff that would be a major pain in the butt to replace, like the Quicken version of my checkbook. Quite a few years ago hard drives got way too big to be backed up onto a manageable number of floppies, even Zip disks. Maybe I'll mosey into the 21st century when I get my next computer.

I devote less time to contemplating the possible meltdown of my six-year-old hard drive than I do to the stuff that gets lost because it wasn't written down or otherwise recorded in the first place. The letters that don't get written because so many of us are communicating by e-mail, instant messaging, cell phones, and the like. Even now I write enough letters to realize that there's a big difference between letters and, say, this bloggery, or the posts I make to the handful of e-lists I'm active on, or the comments I occasionally make in AlterNet threads. The letters are one-to-one (or sometimes one-to-two) -- shaped by what I know of the recipients. The rest are all one-to-many; they're published from the get-go, in a way that private letters aren't. A one-to-one correspondence can build on itself over time because the parties develop a shared history that they can refer to, riff off of, revise, reinterpret. A one-to-many can't do this, or at least not to the same extent, because the many is always changing.

At present there's much hoopdedoo among lefties, progressives, and liberals about Big Telecomm's attempt to colonize -- for profit, of course -- the Internet. I don't like the idea either, and I hope Big Telecomm gets thwarted, but I also hope that all of us who depend on computer-facilitated communication will consider its vulnerability to Big Telecomm and other forces that don't wish us well. Our communication isn't just dependent on computers and the Internet; it's dependent, more basically, on electricity. None of these things are available free for the taking; they aren't even cheap. Plenty of people have little or no or irregular access to them. Even those of us who do have regular access to them are vulnerable: we don't control the flow of electricity, and we don't control Big Telecomm.

As an antiwar activist, I learned that "we" (aka the good guys ) had no control over how, or even whether, we were portrayed in the news media. As a feminist, I learned that "we" (meaning especially feminists and lesbians) had little control over how, or whether, we were depicted in books, magazines, newspapers, you name it. As both an antiwar activist and a feminist, I learned the importance of alternative media, all kinds of alternative ways of communicating with each other. Typewritten papers and broadsheets. Mimeographed pamphlets. Teach-ins and rallies. Songs. Alternative newspapers, periodicals, publishers, and bookstores. I marveled at the ingenuity, persistence, and courage of people in Soviet Russia, who circulated essays and whole books in manuscript form, each copy made by hand, the way the medieval monks did it.

Could we do the same? How long would it take us to adapt to, say, an abrupt circumscription of access to the Internet? Behemoth Booksellers and Behemoth Publishers have gutted the network of indy bookstores and presses. A few posters to AlterNet claim that we USians currently live in a fascist or neo-Nazi or seriously repressive state. I think they don't have a clue what that means. If they do -- can they produce and circulate samizdat?

I can write in longhand. If I make an effort, my handwriting is even legible. It wouldn't take long to regain my facility with a manual typewriter. I can sing songs and even play a few of them, unplugged of course. Doesn't seem like all that much, does it.

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