Digital hoarders: “Our terabytes are put to use for the betterment of mankind”

Think we prefer the album version, but OK, sure Top of the Pops

Today perhaps more than ever, data is ephemeral. Despite Stephen Hawking's late-in-life revelation that information can never truly be destroyed, it can absolutely disappear from public access without leaving a trace.

It's not just analogue data, either. Just as books go out of print, websites can drop offline, taking with them the wealth of knowledge, opinions, and facts they contain. (You won't find the complete herb archives of old Deadspin on that site, for instance.) And in an era where updates to stories or songs or short-form videos happen with the ease of a click, edits happen and often leave no indication of what came before. There is an entire generation of adults who are unaware that a certain firefight in the Mos Eisley Cantina was a cold-blooded murder, for instance.

So on any given day, 19-year-old Peter Hanrahan now spends his evenings bingeing on chart-topping radio shows from the 1960s. A student from the North of England, he recently started collecting episodes of Top of the Pops-a British chart music show that ran between 1964 and 2006-after seeing the 2019 Tarantino flick, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

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