The Digital Dark Ages
deprogrammaticaipsum.com
deprogrammaticaipsum.com
The complete corpus of Classical Latin and Greek literature can be found in the Loeb Classical Library. Which easily fits on a couple of bookshelves in your study (note that the books consist of the original text and a translation on the facing page). With a couple more volumes, of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, we can also add to our collection every single identified piece of inscription, including even an entire volume on mileposts. Similarly thorough works will doubtless exist for all classical languages, even non-European ones like Mayan or Chinese.
Now walk into a library, even the tiny library of a small town. You are surrounded by more written text than survives from likely not only Classical Antiquity but all of human history through 1500. Even in the digital age, we are still producing more written text than most of human history. Probably, we are preserving a larger fraction of texts than were preserved from the Classical era. It's telling that the complaints of the loss of preservation are of the kinds of ephemera which don't exist for most periods of history. (Also telling that the person complaining about this loss of preservation is a "senior Research Software Engineer" and not a historian or archivist or similar field that actually deals with preserving or working with preserved data.)
Well, no. The complete surviving corpus, sure, but almost all of those works have been lost, never mind those of earlier eras.
A short summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work
For a specific example: I was trying to understand some of the history of logic. I learned that that in ancient Greek times Stoic logic was widely used. What was it? That is hard to answer, because practically everything is lost now. We've had to reconstruct the Stoic logic axioms from fragmentary sources, that's how bad it is. We know there was more, but we don't know exactly what it was.
In the modern day, I think we are doing a better of job of preservation and archival than existed in Classical times. Take something like Geocities--we had a major archival organization step in to preserve a record of what is effectively non-notable people writing about non-notable things. While I'm unsure if that particular archival record will exist in 2,000 years, I strongly suspect that there will exist some notable archive of non-notable people writing about non-notable things, the kind of record that historians today can only dream of having from those who existed 2,000 years prior to us.
I suspect the actual value is much smaller, probably less than 0.1%. Those estimates are based on surviving references and indices, and there's no way to know how complete they are. Fundamentally we're all just guessing - if something's completely lost, there's a very good chance that it's impossible to know centuries later.
> In the modern day, I think we are doing a better of job of preservation and archival than existed in Classical times.
I hope so, but I have my doubts. When Sumerian libraries burned, the clay tablets simply hardened.
Today, most modern data storage systems only last a decade or two, they require copying for the data to be readable... and we have no idea if future generations will make those copies. Also, increasingly data is stored in dynamically-generated pages on websites and in single page applications (SPAs). If the website goes down, a lot of the data is essentially impossible to get.
I really appreciate efforts like the GitHub Arctic Vault: <https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/>. That has a fighting chance to be recoverable in two thousand years. But the Library of Alexandria showed us that if all the archives are in one place, they can all be simultaneously lost.
I certainly would like to this we're doing a better job of archiving. I want to be proven wrong :-).
A sad tangent: most of the Mayan literature specifically was deliberately destroyed during the Spanish conquest [1].
> Our knowledge of ancient Maya thought must represent only a tiny fraction of the whole picture, for of the thousands of books in which the full extent of their learning and ritual was recorded, only four have survived to modern times (as though all that posterity knew of ourselves were to be based upon three prayer books and Pilgrim's Progress).
And a typical attitude of the times (Bishop Diego de Landa, July 1562):
> We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.
It's rare to impossible for a single institution to maintain all such personal record. The internet archive does a valiant job, but barely scrapes the surface. The only way for this to work is if individuals maintain their own historical record. So the question is how?
I figure most people aren't savvy so a company who provides a storage device, and perhaps services to help gather said data, would be essential. I'm thinking it works like life insurance where someone pays over time and their data is then delivered to them, at the conclusion of any payments, or to their family in the event of a death. Perhaps this could simply be rolled into life insurance or something of the like?
That's the basic gist. Put the power to save this information in the hands of the people to maintain going forward. Like having someone's written notebook kept long into the future. Except it's a storage drive. Tech hurdles there for sure, but with things like MS's Project Silica, and the like, perhaps not insurmountable.
[1]: https://www.deadmansswitch.net/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing
[3]: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/239111/how-to-s...
Why's that? We have long had effective institutional preservation of knowledge and historical records by public and university libraries. Why shift to the inefficiency of individual, amateur preservation rather than support skilled professionals to do it right?
Right now, I am having a hard time tracking down a 2002 or 2003 CD-ROM (New_LocClim) that may have contained the weather station data underlying the FAO/GPCC rainfall product. It seems far more likely that a library or other institution, rather than some random person, would have preserved that information in a way I can discover and access.
That’s not true. A not uncommon type of museum in Japan are the “Showa Era Museums”.
I was not alive during this era, but I feel nostalgia nonetheless. For context, these museums usually capture the 50s-70s, Japan’s rapid economic growth feeding into consumerism, or maybe the other way around, and there are record players, pachinko machines, and a very distinctive, bright, neon filled aesthetic.
Once upon a time, by recording a thing you made it durable *by default* and even got a copy you could do with what you liked. Now, recording and sharing words or ideas comes with zero assumption of durability. Your service provider's ToS and business fortunes might support them keeping it around and accessible for now, but there is zero guarantee that will outlast the whims and fortunes of a SaaS providers.
The combination of DRM (to lock down devices) and "everything lives in the cloud" (to keep custodianship and control of data in vendors' hands, not creators') means that without very intentional, often obscure and/or annoying manual steps, your correspondence, recordings, and other creative output will not survive you. Even _with_ painstaking effort there's every chance it won't work.
Personally, I've tried for a couple of years now to get people I work with to write important things down somewhere that isn't Slack, GDocs or another pay-to-play service. Business, personal, silly, whatever: as it stands, all of that culture and history and creativity is just going to go "poof!" as soon as some company's C-suite does the math and decides the storage and compute to make it available don't pencil out any more.
Now I just accept that unless I have 1) a complete, easily-cloned copy of something, 2) that I can access and manipulate using OSS software, 3) on a general-purpose computer I physically control, then that thing is not *mine*. If it isn't mine, I can't decide what happens to it in the near term, much less once I'm not around to lobby for access.
I understand and sympathize with the idea of open standards, open formats, and the desire for more accessible media and storage. I really do. The loss of ownership over everything is a bummer. However, pretending that we are more at risk of data loss now than before is not valid. DRM always gets cracked. Pirates always find a way. Encryption is likely already compromised by intelligence agencies who slurp everything up in their own archives. Data hoarders are a thing. Mass duplication of data is a thing. People have made recordings and films showing interactions with all of our current systems. People have made all kinds of documentation, documentaries, tutorials, and other media regarding our modern culture, modern technologies, and so on. This is the single most well documented period in history. If anything, we’re doing better at this now than ever before.
The real issue for future historians will be sifting through the amount of material.
Even if 90% is encrypted and lost it seems likely to me that the remaining 10% is so much in sheer volume that future historians will have little trouble piecing it all together. At least compared to say roman times where you're lucky to get anything at all
If the 10% of surviving information isn't a representative sample of the other 90%, the conclusions future historians will draw will be very wrong.