It's only natural that as humans we constantly worry about the limited nature of our existence. We make pills and procedures to live longer and while we're living, run faster, jump higher, and generally be more impressive. Perhaps then it's not surprising that we would extend our own sense of self-preservation to the art we create and try to preserve it for all eternity. In many fashions, we've seen great success in preserving things that are either born or largely exist in print, but now we're seeing some issues with preserving that which is both digitally born and is meant to exist within a digital realm. As the Aggripa files show us, copies of William Gibson's work eventually disappears as it encrypts itself out of existence and other works are constantly challenged by updating software, plug-ins, and changes to coding.
But is this really such a bad thing? In some ways it seems that through a digital medium we've actually created a great avenue for a very organic art form that easily mimics our own fleeting nature. We are born and surely despite what clever tricks we employ to prolong our lives and extend our existence on this planet, without a doubt some day we will die. There may be a really compelling opportunity here to create art that does the same. Sadly this will result in e-literature not existing through all the ages and we won't necessarily be able to share the same great reading we had as children with our own children, but it will open the possibility of every generation having its own contextually beautiful and unique experience reading things that only exist so long as they are not updated into the digital great beyond.
As we see in "Digital Materiality," "Computers are writing technologies, but they are also environments: work spaces, surrogate desktops that function as extensions of self" (111). In that regard, if my computer and my ideas are an extension of me in a digital organic environment, in one way or the other they'll have to eventually face an expiration date so why fight it? What I'm proposing here is that it may be, oddly, an unnatural act to insist that our art be divorced from our temporal existence and digital writing may be the answer to our previously inorganic existence in art.