Kenneth, in his bib⁄chapter, was retelling the anecdote just before I made the first partial copy of the media files of UbuWeb to be served from the Memory of the World server. While he remembers his fears and doubts, I remember clearly the technical reasons: how hard disks dying somewhere in Mexico and how the death of a hard disks immedieatly led to the conceptualization of the death of UbuWeb by Kenneth. That part about conceptual death didn’t end up in a book and fears and doubts are described this way:
I wanted to throw in the towel, [..] that perhaps it had come time to wave the white flag. I was getting burnt out and couldn’t see why I should keep on doing this.”.
I am not sure if Kenneth remembers his concept impro on how slowness of that hard disk death is, maybe, the right way for UbuWeb to pass away. How people will start to discover that parts of the UbuWeb are not anymore available and by time UbuWeb will lead itself to the slow excintiction from the internet. The slow death as it dies of old age.
Kenneth’s narration/conceptualization of the UbuWeb death strongly reminded me on my favourite science fiction novel “Bicentennial man” by Isaac Asimov (in the Robot series). In the novel a character named Andrew Martin starts his living as a robot in a household. He was from the very first series of robots from househould. After some time they found out that he had some software bugs and that was fixed for all newer series of robots. It could be that Andrew was different because of those bugs. He was creative. He lived much longer than his hosting family and as they would die he felt he is not a robot without feelings. At certain point of his life he started to work on his own recognition as human. He felt he thinks freely, feels and contribute to the society so he should be recognized as one of us, humans. Humans of his time didn’t make his mission easy. He had to lie to another robot-surgeon that he is robot so the surgeon would do an operation which irreversibly made Andrew age and die. When humans recognized that Andrew decided to die in order to get recognized as human they recognized him as a human. Eventually Andrew died.
bib⁄Bicentennial man is my favorite science fiction novel. Kenneth’s conceptualization of UbuWeb slowly dying reminded me of that story but I didn’t want UbuWeb to die like that. I felt Andrew would approve that too.