CIVILIZATION
THE RUINS OF THE INFORMATION SOCIETY Site : Point Nemo (Pacific Ocean) Competition entry - 24H competition With Tobias Richterich, Nordine Mahmoudi and Jakub Sahatqija.
From the rise of the firsts ziggurats to the fall of Rome, how many civilizations have come and gone since homo sapiens is walking on earth? It seems to be the human curse to see the worlds they are building crumbling apart, leaving behind only relics of forgotten empires. If our civilization is no exception to the rule and is ultimately doomed to collapse, what relics will it leave behind? Will we manage to secure the preservation of our collective memory in a better way? On the rise of the information society defined by fluxes of data, a full backup of the « big data » is like a perfect snapshot of our civilization. Instead of designing a server tower connected with a cloud, another tool for the current network society, we propose a device designed to leave a legacy to the next civilization in the form of an off-line, off-site sealed backup of data. Our proposal consists of a pod operating far from human societies around point Nemo, a pole of inaccessibility in the Pacific ocean. Connected to the network, the floating station receives all the data produced by mankind. The engineers working in the facility are the modern version of the copyist monks who used to devote their lives to protect and hide the knowledge of their societies during medieval dark ages. With the help of machine learning tools and complex algorithms, the work of the neo-monks is to sort the data, keeping only the essentials bits of knowledge of our collective wisdom, and classify them. Once the data arranged, they engrave it into sealed storage boxes and sink them in the ocean. Sub-marines drones then take care of stacking the data boxes on the oceanic floor in a rigorous layout following the classification of knowledge pattern. Over the decades, the centuries, and following the exponential growth of data and cognition, the stacking of boxes creates a landscape of pixels, a sunken city of information. On the location of the ancient city of R’yleh described by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, future generations will discover the submerged relics of our civilization and, while decoding them, unveil the mystery of its dissolution.