We as a society need to become more comfortable with the destruction of information. Not every piece of past data is valuable. The hypothetical future value of most past data is less than the cost of preserving it.
Where I think we collectively have an issue is when we're super into someone else archiving it. And that they then need to figure out a way to finance it all.
"We started dumping stuff that we thought was obviously of no future use, groups that specialized in a lot of talk and no substance, so to speak. For example, fairly early on there was a newsgroup about abortion which specialized in violent arguments."
That's why not only the very earliest Usenet posts, before Spencer started archiving in 1981 (Usenet began in 1979) but even some of the posts in the 1980s are still lost. It's too bad; today, wouldn't more of us rather see what was being said about abortion in 1984 than sift through the arcana of bug fixes in systems that have probably been long since retired? "It was perfectly reasonable from the viewpoint of stuff that we might want to use again, but a little sad from today's viewpoint," Spencer admits.
--------
One of the challenges is that, even if storage comes close to free, the management of "everything" isn't. I've been going through this with cleaning up my photo library. It's not that a TB or so of storage matters much one way or the other but getting rid of dupes and near-dupes, adding better metadata, and so forth is a lot of work.
A friend of my mom's saved every bank statement, utility bill, and cancelled check (this was when you actually got your cancelled checks back from the bank every month).
She thought her kids "might be interested in looking at it" some day. Of course they weren't and when she died they threw it all in a dumpster.
Newspapers and books are one thing. Every random photo on your phone and piece of paper that comes through your home is quite another. Nobody is intersted in it. Throw it away.
> Nobody is intersted in it. Throw it away.
How about you focus on how to live your life and I'll handle how to live mine?
You might be surprised what a researcher in 2060 will get out of your high school newspaper (especially as the ability to computationally aggregate old digitized primary records continues to advance).
The problem I find is that I have a ton of stuff that's neither "must keep" or "trash can" but, while I don't really begrudge it the space in my house, for now, it's also not stuff I'm going to spend hours and hours scanning against some future want.
I've come to observe that we're much too much dominated by a clerkish worldview - the imperial chinese civil service exams (sold in the West as meritocracy) have mostly taken over the world.
And what file clerk does not shudder at the thought of not keeping archives?
Now think how things were done before there were written exams, and before it was practical to keep thorough records of just about everything.
Different worldviews. And ours now is shaped by clerks.