A Preparation Kit for Increasing Irrelevance

The talk, given at HOPE XV in 2024, looks at how the record of hacker culture slips away as the people who lived it age and die. Jason Scott, who works at the Internet Archive, frames his own collecting as a way of holding onto material that seemed irrelevant when it was made. His examples range from textfiles.com and old bulletin board files to a large donated collection of 1970s and 1980s erotic fan fiction newsletters.

A large part of the middle is about people. He recalls several figures from hacker history who have died, including a longtime conference volunteer, the comic artist Ed Piskor, and Kevin Mitnick, and explains how their stories survive only through the material and memories others keep. He also describes preserving a streamer's years of recordings after a torrent was kept alive by a single seed, and notes how slang, memes and early online content become unintelligible within a few years.

The closing section is practical. Scott explains that digitizing at scale depends on money, citing per-pallet scanning costs and the specialist equipment a magazine run needed. He offers a personal archiving approach: sort your files into things only you made, things kept for others, and things kept for humanity, then copy what matters to several drives and trusted people. His takeaway is that a legacy rests on the people you affected more than on what you produced.