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Alex says, &quot;Digital work is inherently ephemeral.&quot;  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&#x27;s axe.  The Torah is digital—encoded in a sequence of discrete symbols rather than continuously varying quantities—and that&#x27;s why it&#x27;s survived for 3000 years.  The digitization of Socrates&#x27;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 &quot;exact copy&quot; make sense.  You can make an exact copy of some version of the Torah or the Symposium because it&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s sketch of Chifir, Lorie&#x27;s archival UVC, Wirth&#x27;s RISC, uxn&#x2F;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&#x27;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&#x27;t have to accept bitrot as the price of using computers.<p>Alex says, &quot;They’re not as good as having the original, working thing – but they’re much better than nothing&quot;.  Well, let&#x27;s figure out how we can have the original, working thing!  This is software, it&#x27;s a simple matter of programming.