Alex says, "Digital work is inherently ephemeral." This is precisely backwards; digital work is one of the <i>least</i> ephemeral aspects of human material culture, exceeded only by occasional miraculous analog exceptions like the Pyramids, potsherds, the Lascaux paintings, and Ötzi's axe. The Torah is digital—encoded in a sequence of discrete symbols rather than continuously varying quantities—and that's why it's survived for 3000 years. The digitization of Socrates's words by Plato and Xenophon is the reason we argue about him today, 2500 years later, rather than his forgotten Persian contemporaries or even Heraclitus.<p>Being digital is what makes the idea of an "exact copy" make sense. You can make an exact copy of some version of the Torah or the Symposium because it's only the discrete letters that matter; the analog nuances of tone of voice or thickness of pen stroke do not count.<p>So digitality is the <i>alternative</i> to the ephemerality of the analog, which is inevitably eaten up by moths and rust. We all know this about digitized <i>language</i>, but for some reason now that we've digitized <i>reasoning</i> in the form of computer programs, we habitually throw up our hands and declare defeat in the face of inevitable ephemerality.<p>This is bullshit.<p>What I really want, instead of screenshots, is a deterministic, reproducible computing environment. The idea is something like uxn or Nock: a platform that's simple enough to stay compatible forever, and efficient enough to be used for many things, even if there are a few things that I do on a computer that need more performance.<p>There are a lot of inspirational examples that offer tempting evidence that this is possible for large, interesting classes of computations: the Smalltalk-78 revival emulator Vanessa Freudenberg wrote, the UM of the Cult of the Bound Variable (which had over 300 successful independent reimplementations), Nguyen and Kay's sketch of Chifir, Lorie's archival UVC, Wirth's RISC, uxn/Varvara, the JVM, and the numerous emulators of things like the MS-DOS environment, the NES, and the Gameboy that are good enough to run the original games.<p>I'm not saying it would be an improvement to do all your digital creative work on an emulated Gameboy in order to ensure that it was reproducible. I think we can do a lot better than that. None of the presently existing archival virtual machines are adequate. But I think the reproducibility of Gameboy games tells us that we don't have to accept bitrot as the price of using computers.<p>Alex says, "They’re not as good as having the original, working thing – but they’re much better than nothing". Well, let's figure out how we can have the original, working thing! This is software, it's a simple matter of programming.