On Twitch and Posterity
Today, Twitch abruptly indicated that as of April 19, a 100-hour storage limit will be implemented for stream highlights and uploads. Usually, Twitch delists and deletes stored streams after 60 days, but highlighting a stream in part or in full would prevent that from occurring. Effectively, highlighting an entire stream evaded the deletion process, resulting in essentially unlimited storage of past broadcasts (or VoDs (videos on demand), as they're often called).
Up front, I will admit that I do not like how this change is being implemented. I do not think it is right to force streamers to scramble to preserve their VoDs elsewhere in such a short amount of time. Even if Twitch considers these streamers to have been abusing the highlights system to get free storage, this is simply how many people were using their platform. Two months is a very short amount of time for individuals to coordinate the export of possibly thousands of hours of streams; it represents a sudden impact to their time, energy, and money. And at a deeper level, I disagree with such decisions being dictated from above, in service of capital, with very little input from the people who make Twitch what it is.
The rest of this post will be me sussing out how I feel about the change in full. I think it poses real questions about not only the economics of Twitch, but the environmental footprint, and more interesting to me: how I feel about the preservation of personal data in general. My goal is not to play devil's advocate for Twitch but to ask questions about the costs of storing all of our data and what it means to do so.
I do not know much about the numbers at Twitch and I suspect many people can say the same. We do know it's reportedly not profitable. People who know more about this stuff than I do indicate that storage and bandwidth (which Twitch requires in abundance) are two primary expenses in cloud computing. Whether they are "just barely" unprofitable, using creative accounting to appear unprofitable, or burning cash... I cannot say. What I can say is that this shit does not grow on trees, even if in theory Amazon could bankroll it for a long time.
People of my age cohort are often quite used to getting free things on the Internet and have been for a long time. Music, art, books, movies, games... all of these are frequently made freely available because of a creator or platform's practices, or through less-legal channels if you know where you look. There are definitely arguments to be made that this is how it should be, especially in cases where a given creative work is not or cannot be made available for purchase. I do not disagree that we deserve common ownership of our culture. But my point is that we are used to it; we are habituated to it; we take it as a given and for granted.
But it takes real human labor and natural resources to construct, store, and distribute digital data of any kind. It took real work, a lot of real work, to produce the infrastructure and society that underlies that. What I am saying is that it incurs our world real costs to produce, store, and distribute our art. It is not free in the sense of time or money or energy or natural resources. And I think that is easy to forget when you can download and play Blood Will Tell: Tezuka Osamu's Dororo for PS2 for zero dollars, so long as you have a PC and Internet connection.
Let me ask a quick question before I get to my next point: do you think it would have been reasonable to expect Twitch to store a hundred or a thousand years worth of user's VoDs, if they were instead making this decision in 2115 or 3115 instead of 2025? Do you think that would be a good use of the natural resources and labor required to make that happen?
What I'm getting at is we cannot think of this solely as "Twitch doesn't want to foot the bill for a free aspect of their service anymore". It's bigger than that, even if that's what drove the decisionmaking here. It's also "the planet's resources are finite and that includes our capacity to store our creative works". Taken to one extreme, I do not think it is possible for our world to store all of the things we create in eternal perpetuity. The other extreme -- saving nothing of our past -- may be possible but is obviously disagreeable on many grounds up to and including human survival. We need some amount of the past to understand our present and navigate our future.
The resulting questions are manifold and complex. What do we keep? How freely available do we make it? What do we discard? After how long? Who decides? How do they decide? On what grounds do they have such authority? What happens if we keep too much? What happens if we discard something essential?
And I'm asking that on a mass scale but I also want to ask questions on the individual scale. You will die one day. What tangible remnant of yourself will you leave behind? Where will you leave it? How will others access it? What will they gain from it? How long should the world hold onto it?
Let's say you have 1000 hours of your archived streams. What are you planning to do with all that? Are you going to watch it all? Is anyone? If not, would it be best to highlight the essential parts? How do you choose what is essential? How proactively should you ditch the rest of it?
I'm not saying we should leave nothing behind. I'm not saying you shouldn't hold onto some things like that in the here and now. I do not necessarily keep a lot of my history, but I keep a lot relative to what humans have historically been capable of, and I have essentially lost all of my possessions on multiple occasions. And some of those things have meaning to me. Notes I took in school. A letter from a friend. One of the last things my mother ever wrote. Clothes I will never wear again. I am not advocating for a total disposal of our own recordings. But I think we should reckon with the ephemeral nature of what we experience, what we create. Because we are impermanent. Life will remind us of that sooner or later.
But there's an underlying problem I wish to point out here, because it's essential to acknowledge: right now the power is seemingly not in our hands. Certainly not as regards this Twitch policy. The answers to these questions are largely being chosen by and in service of corporations. Twitch decides what you put on their platform. Or they just boot you.
And even when we get to choose, our choices are circumscribed by a world in service of capital. Do you store your VoDs for public viewing on Twitch or on YouTube? Do you store your personal data on iCloud or Dropbox? Or maybe you store it yourself on your very own Seagate or Western Digital drives. Do you buy them from Amazon or Newegg?
I point this out not to disempower us. Not to act as if we cannot make our own choices or never will be able to. Or that we cannot even try to do so, that we lack the power to change our circumstances. I point this out because I think it's essential to understand what makes us feel insignificant so we can fight against those feelings. To understand what does actually wrest the power from our hands, so we know what to fight against if we want it back. Because that disempowerment conditions us to not even ask about these things, to try to make heads or tails of them, to confront them proactively. And that is a vulnerability that makes these corporations feel enabled to just spring these changes on us with very little discussion or warning or immediate recourse.