I have only been following the Arweave Eco for about a year and the Alex Archive for half a year. I don’t come from a technical background. I can code very little, but I am interested in technology. I find some of the things happening in the Arweave Eco a bit challenging to wrap my head around on a technical level, but I look at it from another perspective.
I see Arweave as a public good. And I see the Alex Archive as one of many examples of how Arweave supports building new possibilities for the web. How Bitcoin revolutionized how we think of money, Arweave revolutionized how data can be stored and used. This is done with permanent, immutable and decentralized data storage. For a better explanation of how Arweave works I recommend you read this post from the Arweave Project.
Before going into why the Alex Archive is important for preservation of human culture, I want to expand on the why for permanent, immutable and decentralized data storage.
I enjoy reading history, and I believe it's important to learn history for personal development, compassion for others, and overall broader understanding and outlook on the world. Some of the most powerful books I’ve read were The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer, and The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. These examples put my life into perspective, and made me appreciate how good I have it. It also made me think about how bad things can get. How humans are capable of such evil, as history has proved over and over.
This is what motivated Arweave founder Sam Williams to build Arweave. He mentions books like The Gulag Archipelago, 1984, Man’s Search for Meaning, and The Aquariums of Pyongyang as life changing in how he views the world. One thing that he concluded in his readings about the worst of authoritarian regimes in history is the importance of controlling the information. Controlling the information distribution is important for making these societies function.
There have always been centralized entities that control information whether it be the church, state, big tech corporations, etc. Now with Arweave, anyone can store information onto a distributed system that has no one controlling party.
This now brings me as to why Alex is a public good for preserving human culture.
Alex is a decentralized archival platform that preserves human history and culture digitally. This is done with the immutable and permanent data storage of Arweave. Institutions and creators can collect digital content on a topic of their choice in what Alex calls ‘pools’. Anyone is free to start their own pool, and they can decide how much they will receive from contributions for doing the archiving work.
The digital content that is archived are called ‘artifacts’. Artifacts are permanently preserved digital content that can be documents, books, images, audio, or videos.
Besides utilizing a novel way to store historical data, Alex also creates a new incentive structure for digital archiving. Traditional archival institutions pay for the storage costs and the archiving processes that people access for free. With Alex, the people contribute Arweave tokens to archival pools to pay for its permanent storage on Arweave. By doing this, contributors receive artifacts back into their wallet, which they can then collect and trade.
Read more about how Alex works here.
The name Alex, is inspired by the Great Library of Alexandria, the ancient Egyptian library that famously burned in 48 BC, which lost thousands of years of historical records. Alex’s mission is to preserve important historical artifacts for the enrichment of all people. To ultimately not allow another burning of the Library of Alexandria. Alex permanently stores important historical and cultural information that can never be lost, tampered with or held hostage in a centralized server.
In the beginning of The Gulag Archipelago, Zolzhentiysn writes his gratitude to the people that assisted him in providing information and preserving the manuscript as he escaped persecution. Without stories like this ever coming to light, the world may never have gotten to see the true brutality of the gulag system due to the tight control on the information dissemination. This is just one of countless examples of how authoritarian regimes enforced control on the information distribution and how brave men and women had to do remarkable things to get their stories heard.
As a society we must prevent these terrible events we read about in history from happening again. The controlling of information from those in power often starts in small steps that go unnoticed. Recently we have seen classic literature rewritten, social media, and school curriculum censored, among many other examples, which ultimately distorts our history. Are these attempts at controlling the narrative of society? Or are these just naive attempts at righteousness? I cannot answer these questions. And I never plan to try. All that I know is that the Alex Archive allows for the permanent storage of all information, so we can let history speak for itself.
That is why Alex is a public good.
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Please reach out to me on Twitter , if you have any questions about Alex or starting a archival pool. Or you can join the Alex Discord server, to connect with the community and stay up to date on new features.
Originally published here.
Alex
Agreed! Good post,