You know the piece of software called BitTorrent. For me, the program’s concept is rather more like a wizardly act: a shamanic figure in her cloak, waving her hands murmuring some spells, so that the spirits of Earth and Heaven would come to put together into a whole. I was thinking of Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä. Calling pieces of other-wordly existing software to assemble together into a Frankenstein. But of course you’re assured that what you get is a clean, error-free chunk.
The other day I talked with a friend, and we came to the notion of “distributed past”: we always leave traces, voluntarily or involuntarily, and pieces of our past, into others’ memory. Some time later in life, when we meet those people who seem now to come from another world, they begin to feed us back those pieces and traces, and we begin to reassemble our past — a social software that I call, in a copycat fashion, PastTorrent.
Sadly, though, instead of a clean, error-free chunk, what you piece together from PastTorrent is full of misrememberances, CRC errors, questionable or uncertified derivative versions, revisions, modifications, and even new lines of code that did not even exist in the original version.
不少人應該聽過BitTorrent這套軟體（我喜歡那「位元暴雨」的大雨形象，讓人想起米蘭昆德拉的小說《不朽》）。我總覺得BT的概念更像是某種巫術：穿著袍子的修道人，揮手唸咒，祈求四方諸靈前來，合體成形。我聯想到的是宮崎駿的《風之谷》。將各方的軟體片段合成一隻巨獸。不過，當然，BT掛保證，你收到的東西是乾淨、沒有錯誤的大塊文章。
有一天，和一位朋友聊天時，我們談到了關於「分散式過去」的說法：我們總是有意無意地將我們過去生活的片段和足跡，留在別人的記憶之中。多年之後，當我們再次遇到那些如今看來有如從另一世界而來的人們，他們重新送回過去的那些片段和足跡，而我們以此重組出我們的過去－－我將這種社會軟體，很沒創意地稱之為 “PastTorrent”。
不過，悲傷的是，從PastTorrent重組出來的過去，不但不是乾淨、沒有錯誤的整塊東西，反而充滿了記憶錯誤、CRC error、令人質疑未經簽章驗證過的衍生版本、增訂版、改寫版、甚至是從未在原始版本中存在過的新程式碼。
lukhnos :: Apr.14.2004 ::
essays 試作與習作 ::
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