My opinion is that we should stop obsessing about storing everything and anything. It's unhealthy...we're accumulating too much. Almost everything on the internet is not worth preserving.
What does that mean? By what measure is "too much"?
> Almost everything on the internet is not worth preserving.
Certainly true. But some things are very, very much worth preserving and we don't necessarily know what those things are in the present.
It already seems intuitive to me that people are far too obsessed about storing anything and everything, from photos to notes to random thoughts and more. To me it seems pathological. I saw one estimate that is around 500 exabytes already... it looks a lot like those people whose basements are full of unused junk, only in virtual form. I also noticed for sure that people keep way too much stuff they never use...I've rarely met anyone who doesn't. That certainly carries over to their virtual life too.
Humans have natural instincts which makes them hoard because that would have been adaptive in times of scarcity (i.e. our ancient past). Now, in times of surplus, that instinct is mostly maladaptive.
So I DO posit that humans on average place a higher value on hoarding than they should, and that if they actually took the time to override this basal instinct with higher brain functions, then on AVERAGE they would be happier.
I don’t exactly disagree. But this sounds a lot like hoarding.
Think about it in terms of art. Social media has exploded with various digital artists of all kinds. With the tools available to us these days, I'd also posit at least some of that art in a few hundred years would be considered beyond even the renaissance masters.
However, the sheer amount of it available today compared to the past likely means most of it will be lost to history.
Taking the same logic in reverse, how many masterpieces in history were lost because they weren't important to store, or their creator went undiscovered for their entire lives?
The same can be said to all sorts of knowledge and insights. Given that digital media is largely some kind of knowledge storage, we'll likely lose a ton of those too.
Now, the problem is that LLMs are polluting our digital record. It will become harder and harder to distinguish human text from bots.
When we except that both what we create and ourselves are transient, life become better. Concentrate on the now.
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Edit: not sure which reply to reply to, so commenting here.
My badly made point was that trying ourselves to insure the longevity of something we create is not the best use of our time and resources.
If we create something of value, and it means something to other people, it will spread, and it will be saved for the future and future generations.
Society saving things for the future is essential, and we generally do a good job of it.
Why "instead"? Do both. Writing a book doesn’t really help preserving information: unless you’re really famous you’ll sell a few copies that will go lost, and in 10-20 years it will be impossible to find a single copy of the book. Plus a Wordpress blog is accessible from anywhere, while a book –again unless if you’re very successful– is usually distributed in one country only.
Tell that to the 70% of silent films that are permanently lost.
Do we really miss them?
Ever heard of the library of Alexandria?
Yes: the end of the library of Alexandria had virtually no impact on the preservation of knowledge.
The library of Alexandria slowly declined for various centuries, and was progressively replaced by dozens of libraries in the rest of the world. We don’t know how much of its materials was lost in time, but the key thing is that knowledge of that time was not preserved by libraries but by copies of documents. What we know from Antiquity is mostly due to scribes and monks who spend their life copying content, while libraries have been mostly useless for that purpose.
History is made by people who want to make it. Shelley's Ozymandias is a paradox, not an admonition.
This is easy to say if you're not involved in the work it takes to keep something alive.
For example, the public Norwegian broadcaster NRK lost its recordings of the moon landing (which was also the first night sending) [1], which I would consider quite valuable. Indeed, there is a long list of lost TV recordings from the early days of television [2].
[1] https://www.nrk.no/urix/jakten-pa-den-historiske-apollo-send...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_television_broadcast
What would you say?
What would any historian say?