My grandmother left behind an old cassette tape, containing folk songs from her childhood. The edges of the tape are curled, and when played, it crackles with static. Some words can still be discerned as having been repeatedly rewound and worn down. She often said a phrase I remember very clearly: "The older the sound, the more real it feels."

Last year, while sorting through her belongings, I found that tape. I tried to play it on old equipment, and it barely worked. I converted the entire audio into digital files. The background noise is obvious, there are a few distortions, and some segments are almost unintelligible. But it’s precisely these "flaws" that allow me to see her as she was—sitting in a rattan chair, fanning herself, humming along.

Later, I uploaded this file to a distributed storage system. The system returned a confirmation message, and the file was officially registered. When I played it, the effect was stunning—sound quality so clean it was almost unbelievable, with clear rhythm and all noise removed. From a technical perspective, it achieved "lossless" storage and reconstruction.

But something strange happened. Listening to this perfect version, I instead lost the sense of "her slowly disappearing."

It took me a moment to realize that the wear on the tape was not a malfunction. The blurriness was because she often sang the wrong lyrics, and rewinding repeatedly caused the magnetic particles to fall off. The background noise came from the boiling porridge in the kitchen— the recorder was right there. These are signatures of time, traces of her life.

But the distributed system saw all of these as damages needing repair. It smoothed out all irregularities, reconstructing an "ideal version." The wear was mistaken for errors to be deleted, rather than historical evidence to be preserved.

I preserved the melody but lost time itself.