On Writing for the Long Term
Most writing is optimized for the moment of its publication. The author writes to the reader they imagine today: someone who shares their context, their vocabulary, their anxieties. But what if you wrote for a reader a hundred years from now?This framing is borrowed from the Long Now Foundation’s 10,000-year perspective, applied to text rather than institutions.
This constraint is severe, and that severity is useful. It forces you to ask: what actually matters?
The decay of context
Every text decays. Not the words — those persist — but the context that made them legible. References to current events become opaque. Slang calcifies. Platform conventions vanish. The implicit shared knowledge between writer and reader erodes.
A text written for longevity must carry its own context. It must explain what it assumes. It must link to sources that will themselves endure, or quote them directly if they won’t.PDFs survive better than URLs. Plain text survives better than PDFs. The hierarchy of archival durability roughly matches the hierarchy of format simplicity.
The mathematical relationship between signal and noise in a communication channel is described by Shannon’s formula:
$$C = B \log_2\!\left(1 + \frac{S}{N}\right)$$
Text compressed into jargon has a high information density for its intended audience, but zero for everyone else. Writing for longevity means accepting a lower compression ratio. Spell things out. Define your terms.
Links as memory
The about page describes the philosophy of this site in more detail. Every internal link here is a commitment: I will maintain the target, or I will update the link. Broken links are a form of lying — you told the reader there was more, and then took it away.
External links decay faster than internal ones. For anything important, quote the relevant passage directly. The internet is not an archive.
What survives
The writings that have survived millennia share certain properties. They were copied, again and again, because someone thought copying them worth the effort. Digital text has no copying cost, but it has a different failure mode: abundance. When everything is preserved, discoverability collapses.
Writing for the long term means writing something worth finding.
See also: The Architecture of This Site.