ROSS A. LAIRD

The oldest extant works of human creativity are close to 100,000 years old (yes, I know, not everyone agrees about this — but just go with it). The artifacts of creativity can be remarkably persistent. Yet the past is littered with silent evidence, fragments and snatches of the stuff that was destroyed or misplaced: lost books, paintings, sculptures, cities. (Cities? Yes: the ancient city of Akhetaten was deconstructed brick by brick, during a religious squabble, and scattered across the desert.) Today we know a vanishingly small amount about what has been lost. Sure, we have some texts that describe or refer to lost items (say, Plato describing Atlantis); but we will never know anything about almost all of the creative artifacts of human culture. They are gone.

And now we find ourselves in the age of the perpetual fleeting, the constant temporary, in which digital technologies seem to impart an ephemeral character to creative work. Art lives on the web, in the cloud, through the server. New programs and practices continually challenge us to adapt, re-create, reinvent. Nowadays, a two-year-old computer is old, a two-month-old version of your Internet browser is old, and a two-day-old antivirus protocol is old indeed. 100,000 years of creative persistence seems awfully ambitious in an age when nothing seems to last.

But let's assume you are ambitious. You have staying power. You want your creative work to make its way forward into the next generation, and the next, to follow that future track as far ahead as you can imagine (how far is that, by the way?). When the comet hits, you want your work to survive. Not the big comet, of course, the one that will wipe out all life on the planet. We're talking about the little comet, the one that will incinerate Kamloops. Here's how to keep your stuff safe from that and similar surprises.

Step One: Use Cloud Storage

Forget backup CDs and external hard drives — well, that's the problem, isn't it? You forget to complete the backup routine. But even if you don't forget, CDs and hard drives are poor long-term storage solutions. You might squeeze ten years out of that technology. The cloud, though, is another matter. Distributed servers, simultaneous multiple backups, continuous uptime, automatic updates: and all this for free or almost free. The cloud is where your data should live. (Get a Dropbox account.)

Step Two: Get a Mac

You've heard this before. But yes, it's true. Macs are more secure, easier to use, more polished, friendlier, and (mostly) impervious to the kinds of intrusions and infections faced by Windows computers. Sure, if you install Windows security updates on the day they are released, and if your system was not previously infected, you might be reasonably safe. But in all likelihood your Windows computer is already infected with all manner of nastiness (like the Conficker worm, to choose just one among legions of threats). Such intrusions undermine our confidence in the computing environment, imperil the safety of our data, and corrode our creativity. After all, your creativity cannot flourish when you are worried that the next click will deliver the blue screen of death. (Yes, I have a Mac; but the computer I use for most of my daily work runs on Linux. I'm geeky. Probably you are not. Get a Mac. And, if you do, MobileMe and iDisk are almost as good as Dropbox.)

There is no step three.

Go back and review steps one and two. That's all you need. But if you are truculent (one must use at least one writerly word in an article intended for writers), then there are dozens more steps: keep your firewall secure, install every security patch, update your antivirus software. Do you know how to do any of this? Do you routinely do any of this? Are you ever going to do any of this? No, no, and no. Go back to step two.

(This is a non-linear list. It goes one, two, one, two, four.)

Step Four: The Undiscovered Country

After you have established a good environment for computing, and after your data is secure from even the most vociferous (okay, two writerly words) attacks from hackers and comets (except the big one, of course), and when it no longer matters if you drop your laptop in the bathtub (well, it no longer matters to your data, anyway) — once all of these risks are minimized, you are ready for the revolution of digital creativity. That revolution involves online writing applications (Google Docs, Writeboard), open source tools for publishing and content management (Drupal, WordPress, Radiant), dynamic document versioning (Git, which is wonderfully cool and equally geeky), and the multiverse of social media communities (Twitter, Posterous, Diaspora).

This is the playground of promise for writers today. Our work will last by virtue of our nimbleness, our ability to play across the landscapes of technology and culture. We're moving into a creative environment in which the bricks of the city cannot be scattered by squabbles or war or accident. They will persist longer, and be more secure, than artifacts at any previous time in human history. We worry about the transitory nature of contemporary culture but forget that we are the first people capable of creating work with a potentially infinite future. As usual, we look in the wrong direction while the magic unfolds right before our eyes.