Computer Files Are Going Extinct

Computer Files Are Going Extinct

"One thing I like about files is there’s a consistent way of interacting with them, no matter what’s inside. Those things I mentioned above — copying, sorting, defragging — I can do those to any file. It could be an image, part of a game, or a list of my favorite utensils. Defragmenter doesn’t care. It doesn’t judge the contents...

The quality of files on streaming services was good enough, available on more devices, and gave you access to all recorded music, not just the MP3s you happened to have on your computer. You didn’t need a carefully crafted collection of files on your hard drive anymore. You just needed a username and password to Spotify...

Apple doesn’t make it that easy to get to your files. Images are dumped into a big stream, sorted by date. Audio is somewhere in iTunes. Notes are… in a list? Apps are scattered around the desktop. Some of my files are in iCloud. You can email photos to liberate them from the iPhone, and through a convoluted method via iTunes, you can access some files within certain apps. But those files are transitory — cached, and may be deleted without warning. These aren’t like the carefully crafted files and folders on my computer.

On the Mac, iTunes sorts out your music files for you. They’re handled by the system. The interface displays the music to you and you can sort the files there. But if you look under the hood, at the files themselves, you see a rabbit warren of mess, weird names, and strange folders. “Don’t bother yourself with these,” the computer says, “I’ll handle this for you.” But I do bother myself with them.

I like being able to look at and access my files. But now the systems I use try to stop me from doing so. “No,” they say, “access them through these bespoke, proprietary interfaces.” I just want my file browser back, but now I’m not allowed it. It’s a relic of an earlier era.

Yet I can’t help missing those files and folders and the control I had with them...

The other day, I came across a website I’d written over two decades ago. I double-clicked the file, and it opened and ran perfectly. Then I tried to run a website I’d written 18 months ago and found I couldn’t run it without firing up a web server, and when I ran NPM install, one or two of those 65,000 files had issues that meant node failed to install them and the website didn’t run. When I did get it working, it needed a database. And then it relied on some third-party APIs and there was an issue with CORS because I hadn’t whitelisted localhost.

My website made of files carried on, chugging along. This isn’t me saying that things were better in the old days. I’m just saying that years ago websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies...

The unit of creation has moved from the file to the database entry.

In some ways, that doesn’t make a huge difference. The data is the same, just stored in a database rather than an HTML document. The URL could even be the same, just behind the scenes it fetches the content from a different type of data store. But the implications are much bigger. The content is dependent on a whole heap of infrastructure, rather than being able to stand on its own.

This almost seems to reduce the value of any individual creative act...

Online services have started violating what I thought was a fundamental tenet of digital file manipulation. When I copy a file from one place to another, the file I get at the end is identical to the one I started with. These are digital representations of data that can be copied exactly, bit for bit.

Yet when I upload photos into Google Cloud then download them again, the file I end up with is different from the one I started with. It’s been transcoded, re-encoded, compressed, optimized. Messed with...

When I AirDrop a video, there’s a long initial process where the iPhone is doing something. What is my little supercomputer up to? I’m suspicious. “You’re transcoding, aren’t you?” I accuse it. It’s only later, when I eventually get the file somewhere I can use it, that I find it’s been pushed and pulled so many times it’s a husk of its former glory...

I don’t like this shift from timeless content to what is newest. Now, when I visit websites, they promote to me the latest thing. Why should the content that is the newest be the most important? It seems so unlikely that something that was just created would happen to be better than everything created throughout all time... I miss the universality of files. The fact they can work anywhere, be moved around easily."