This seems a lot of work in a world where most content, and most popular content, is disposable by design.
The books I read, the movies I watch, the music I listen to...I really can't think of how any of it could be described as "disposable by design".
I read a book written in 1966 the other day. That's young by the standards of literature, and yet it's older than I am.
Netflix's entire business model is built on movies not having an expiration date.
And to call music "disposable" is a statement that I don't even know how to respond to.
You do have a point, the book I'm reading right now is a hardback that was published and printed in 1958, but it has suffered some deterioration. The paper in quite a few paperbacks I bought in the '80s are in worse shape.
But then there's projects like Google Books to capture such artifacts ... if they can only negotiate the lawyer gauntlet.
There is no reason for a digital publishing to stop creating new copies of a digital work (once they finally develop an economic model that works.)
It is surely indisputable that much popular music is produced with short-term profit rather than musical excellence in mind.
That, I suggest, is disposable music. Is Britney Spears music getting a bit old? Don't worry, there'll be new mindless, trivial drivel here in a short while.
I may be understanding your point, and if so I apologize, but I think the "format rot" argument is a red herring. Yes, formats come and go. But as long as there's a sizable catalog of content in a given format, it's going to be readable. We can still read WAV files, RTF files and AVI files from decades ago. In fact, most computers can read these formats without even downloading any special tools.
It's true that reading your VisiCalc spreadsheets off of an old tape backup is going to be a pain in the ass. But that was the freaking dawn of digital storage. Imagining that there is going to be the same upheaval in storage in the next 100 years as there was in the last 200 years is absurd. Things are stabilizing. Media are being abstracted away. Powerful catalogs of codecs and transcoders are being packaged up into easy-to-integrate services.
I think there's a reasonable chance that YouTube videos will be viewable on all computing devices for the rest of time without us having to do any transcoding. Maybe Google will migrate to new formats like they're doing with WebM. Maybe Google will eventually sell YouTube off as a historical relic. Maybe they'll even shut it down and someone will suck out all the public video and store it somewhere else like they did with GeoCities.
But acting like YouTube is the same as some tape backup, or an LP... it's just not. The technology is at a very different stage in it's life cycle.
Nonetheless, your argument (correct me if I'm wrong) is essentially that The Internet will automagically preserve all content, the way to decode it and reproduce it in the way it was originally intended to be consumed - forever.
The implication in my post was that the internet won't last forever, that civilizations come and go, and maybe with the end of our civilization the internet will be lost, and with it the key to decoding all this information. I understand that the devices themselves will or already have the capability to preserve the data forever (for all practical purposes), but this is akin to being on a deserted island and saying you have 8 million songs on your iPod, but no earphones to play them with. On top of that, imagine that you go through all the trouble of figuring out how to make earphones from raw materials you find on this island, figuring out how the plug is supposed to work, how to charge the battery - only to find out that the songs are all crap.
I actually think the internet is a kind of permaculture. It's like a new kingdom. We have animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, the bacteria, fungi, etc, and now the bit kingdom. And it's as robust as the other kingdoms.
I doubt you could come up with any kind of vaguely plausible scenario where the internet disappeared completely.