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This does indeed hurt. Then I think about the forever memory of the internet and how everything ever put on it will likely stay forever, and the terrible terrible content on it. Then it hurts a little less.
Except the impermanence of the internet under varying conditions such as repressive censorship by oligarchs/fascists, rising operating costs, or even maintainers simply losing interest is rapidly showing itself.
“The internet is forever” may have been wishful thinking 😭
Except it’s not forever. It could definitely go away, and I would bet that it will.
I mean yeah, all the electricity could stop working and then how would we get on the internet? I like to think about this scenario sometimes, how there would just be all this hardware laying around with all this data on it and no way to access it.
The internet absolutely does not have a forever memory. But you can contribute to the internet’s preservation by running an Archive Team Warrior.
so many things that were once on the internet are now lost
its only forever for popular stuff
Go find me wrathbait fanfics then.
I still mourn the fire of the Library of Alexandria as the symbol of such a loss. Heartbreaking
Don’t worry the odds of anything in that collection surviving the fall of the Roman Empire is unlikely even if it wasn’t burned down.
We lost so many books then because after the empire fell no one had the resources to preserve and copy all the works. They eventually just rotted away
I mean, there’s the Roman empire that didn’t fall (Eastern) and the Islamic world that preserved a lot of that shit. The Renaissance in Italy was kicked off by Greek scholars fleeing the fall of Constantinople bringing copies of Plato with them.
The Eastern Roman Empire didn’t have the resources and experienced a slow decline.
You are right though they were able to preserve some of the texts and knowledge, but they lacked the resources to preserve it all.
Likewise the rise of the Islamic world was simply too late to preserve these texts from antiquity. They certainly had the resources to do so at their height.
The issue is it only takes a century maybe two if conditions are good for books to rot away. Pest infestations combined with a lack of climate control does not preserve books. Especially the types of papers and bindings then were quite susceptible
I wonder if we’re living in a future dark age because so much data is going to rot away. People are trying to copy things off rotting floppies and CDs and such. A lot of digital knowledge will be lost if we keep it on media that requires electricity, power, a specific OS or computer program, etc to access. On the other hand, we still print a lot of material on paper.
Small example: in my job, there is a well known first application of some stuff. That was a groundbreaking program written in the 70s. Most copies got lost/broken, one is known to remain, but anyways no one had a compatible OS, so it is effectively unusable. (Don’t ask more details, I don’t know them)
The Renaissance in Italy was kicked off by Greek scholars fleeing the fall of Constantinople bringing copies of Plato with them.
That is largely a myth. Just as the great fire of the library of Alexandria.
And of that 1%, so much of it is single-source material with little corroboration. A lot of it reads like regal ass-kissing, settling petty personal scores, or TMZ-level gossip.
Looking at you Herodotus and Procopius.
You’re telling me that thousands of years from now people are gonna be missing out on the fan fiction that an 11 year old wrote about Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron?
doubt
Only 1% of contemporary literature is worth surviving so I’m not super concerned
That just means only 1% of ancient literature that was worth surviving did survive, and the other 99% of surviving literature isn’t worth its own survival.
There is loss of data over time as it is edited. There’s so much information, so much written down, so many images, that it can’t possibly all be saved. So people decide what to keep and what gets discarded. And it happens over and over again as time progresses. A lot of old material is even worse off just because it got destroyed, rotted away to illegibility, or just got buried.
That will happen to everything about us as well, except compounded by technological barriers. Modern media like HDDs, SSDs, CDs, and even paper will become unreadable either by degradation or future technological incompatibility - assuming civilization exists in any modern sense in the future.
On top of that, how much of it accurately reflects the perception of the average person of the time? In thousands of years, will there be nothing left of us in literature but a tiny fraction of the perspective constructed by the ultra wealthy and their followers? Kinda makes me want to write on glass plates and bury them somewhere. I guess I’d also have to translate it into a few languages to increase the chances of it being interpretable in the distant future.
Their historical/cultural loss is probably immesurable. Literary, on the other hand - normal distribution applies and significant amount of those 99% were average or worse.
Not a week goes by without me mourning the loss of Alexandria and Nalanda…
And Baghdad
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Take the current amount of ancient literature, multiply it by 100. EZ
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I posted this the other day but I think the words scared people away:
Damn, were could I read my repressed 14th century nun smut
