POAP 🏅

POAP collectors will appreciate Checkpoints by Ruby Justice Thelot (@being-on-line), a book for “all who dedicate their lives to preserving digital memories.” 

Select quotes in 🧵 (1/9)

pm, professor, designer doing research on digital communities, AI and the metaverse

The titular “Checkpoints” refers to a YouTube video where users started writing a “checkpoint” personal life update in comments. The video was taken down suddenly in 2021, “a reminder of how communities can lose their entire histories by relinquishing memory to third-party platforms.” (2/9)

Luckily archivist @rebane2001 had preserved the video and comments, along with 1M+ other videos (so far): “I’m really glad to help people get their comments back, so they can still reflect back on them and be happy about it.” (4/9)

In an interview with rebane2001, they discuss the importance of saving digital artifacts, and how a personal archive “enables retrieval in a way that is specific to you.” (5/9)

“People like [rebane2001] play a role that unfortunately a lot of Big Tech giants have failed to play, which is to safeguard and safekeep our [digital] cultural histories and memories… Without access to these artifacts, we will be forced to piece together our personal and collective histories in a manner that is unmoored from our actual past.” (6/9)

“So much of the culture of any given community hinges on members being able to parse through that community’s digital history, to trace the evolution of its language, in-jokes, and memes.” 

A shining example of a community using POAPs to preserve this history is Rocket Pool https://collections.poap.xyz/rocket-pool/2201 (7/9)

“We are on the eve of a new era of the internet, one bereft of history and lore. We can think of it as a chapter of civilization built on an empty shell… We entrust our memories to a system, and the system fails to maintain them.” (8/9)

Check out Checkpoints here: https://www.irrelevantpress.com/store/pre-sale-a-cyberarchaeology-of-checkpoints-ruby-thelot

“The story of Checkpoints reminds us to be fully aware of the infrastructure we use when we build community in digital realms. Are the structures sturdy? Who controls them?” (3/9)