How to immortalise your content for 10,000 years.

We live in a world of ten-second snapchats and Instagram Live Events. These days, engagement means ephemera—‘blink-and-you’ll-miss-it’ is the best way to capture audience attention. Or is it?

With our eyes peeled for inspired approaches around the web, we discovered an interesting plan to buck the immediacy trend. And not just buck it, but really blow it out of the water—taking content time frames from ten-seconds to ten thousand years. Hi.co, the digital travel journal, is playing the long game.

Hi.co’s 10,000 year plan.

Hi.co is a location-aware content publishing site. The platform was built for writing stories about places—something the founders called ‘narrative mapping’.

After nine years, 2,000,000 words and 14,000 photographs, Hi.co, closed its loop September 1^st, 2016.

Hi.co is home to thousands of memories shared from over 3,000 cities. Amongst moments shared from Sydney, are snapshots from Liverpool, Honolulu and Beirut.

The name Hi comes from the Japanese word Hitotoki, a noun split into two parts, with hito meaning ‘one’ and toki referring to ‘time’. The sum of these parts translating to mean ‘a moment’.

Capture. Write. Publish.

Using a ‘capture, write, publish’ process, people used their smart phones to capture moments which were drafted online. The snippets (and accompaniments like photos and text) could then be placed into the publishing space.

Moments could be shared with the community, with users being able to subscribe to their favourite snippets. Moments range from political satire, inner monologue, to the meaningless and absurd.

Immortalising the moment.

Initially, the founders made a promise:

‘You give us your stories about a place, and we’ll give you a place to put your stories’.

That ‘implicit pact’ Hi.co promised, a home to share stories, will be upheld despite the closure of the journal.

Five copies of the site will be printed on nickel plates, and distributed to archives around the globe—these plates have a shelf-life of 10,000 years (for perspective, the pyramids of Giza were built 4,500 years ago, and have you seen those lately? They’re a mess!).

Everything printed on the plates will be readable through the use of an optical microscope. Here’s hoping that the Hi.co Team bet correctly that citizens of year 12,016 have the technological and language capabilities to appreciate the Hitotoki Archives.

Nickel plate archive contents.

While the plates will be present in only five locations globally (ironic due to the digital spread and accessibility of Hi.co) users can take comfort in the fact that Hi.co intends to keep an online archive of all content for at least ten years. They also offer the opportunity to export all individual contributions, so users retain control over their published works.

See ya later spacemaids.

It’s a unique approach to archiving our online communities—placing value on content that can neither be changed nor added to. There’s certainly no CMS for these seemingly indestructible nickel plates.

Hi.co’s stories reflect all of us. Some moments are beautiful, many are mysterious. All are human.

Take a look at any of our favourites: ‘where the plants are born to die’; ‘the monk in the tree’; and ‘the time machine’—and that fact becomes self-evident.

Perhaps the most compelling story, though, is the overarching narrative that weaves them all together. Is this a forward-thinking approach to documenting and preserving content? Or an anachronistic approach dressed up in modern technology—a simple time capsule?

In this question of time, only time will tell. But for the interim, it’s refreshing to see someone take an alternative approach to the trend of microcosmic content.

There’s still time to explore Hi.co, visit the site to read some of the stories shared over the journal’s lifetime.