Unless civilization is destroyed after a nuclear war, solar event, something else. Knowledge could be lost in a handful of generations. Maybe a global pandemic makes everyone have constant debilitating brain fog and everything just stops working. I think the right actor in the right place could make these things (except the solar thing) happen.

Although a good point to consider is that we have lost the vast majority of information about the past, so it's not like the old way of writing stone tablets or whatever is necessarily good.

Preserving digital data requires constant maintenance, because none of the media we use will last forever. Any maintenance gap of a few decades means the data is lost. Such gaps are inevitable over longer timescales like thousands of years.

LOL, the whole of most of the pre-Facebook social networks has already been lost. And that was where most people were keeping their digital photos from 2000-2008.

No one is going to port anything. As soon as the company that’s hosting it goes under your data will be lost.

preserving books is not cheap.

most private collections will end up destroyed, because their value is unknown and the cost to even evaluate what is worth preserving exceeds the value of the books themselves.

just the other day i heard the story of a private collector leaving 75,000 books behind, that the heirs can't even afford to dispose of, let alone preserve. there is no complete catalogue, if there is one at all, and most certainly not a digital catalogue.

they will most likely end up being permanently destroyed in paper recycling, if they keep the house. otherwise it will be cheaper to just tear the house down with the books still inside.

so in the end the only books being preserved will be libraries as long as those are being funded. for less popular titles that means just a few copies of each book. and those that can be digitized before they are being destroyed.

beyond that what will survive are at best maybe a few private libraries that are on privately owned properties owned by a family that cares.

with that in mind it would actually be an interesting question how to bury books with minimal effort so that they have at least some chance to survive

>If you are a reader, you probably have more books than the entire corpus of ancient Greek writing.

I'm sorry but this is just not true

It is hard to tell what we will leave. Depending on how our civilization declines, if it just the typical path of resource overshoot and decline I do wonder how much of what we are creating today will last. Digital technology is efficient but lacks resilience. Even our printed materials now are on high acid paper that essentially turns into saw dust after less than a hundred years.

The things that make it through these periods are the stuff that is seen as useful to the folks in between. This is why we get a lot of religion, the odd bits of sciences stuff, a lot on growing food and snips of history if lucky. Heck for the might of the Roman empire, we only have 25 seconds of sheet music remaining. It is also funny how little we know about some of the Emperors. Things like, they had children, we do not know their names or if they survived childhood. The gaps are huge.

The things that survive are the things other think are worth surviving. Hygiene practices yes! Tiktok... no.

Future archeologists are going to know lots about our consumption from all the food and drink containers.

Some written items, like street signs, are going to last a long time.

A few things come to mind, the longevity of digital based information, how electronics doesn't survive as well as clay and paper, encrypted storage, commercial software stored information, and how well we may nuke ourselves.

Digital data that we don’t have a very long history of maintaining and largely not maintained and most paper print matter is very short lived relative to what we have gleaned from metal, stone and clay used by prior civilizations.

I think this is an interesting question in that it brings up two points.

The media this culture creates (specifically writing, in general) is very specific but very fragile. So eventually it wears out, and every year our storage media get vastly more fragile- photos from the early 1900s might last longer than stuff on hard drives if humans forget how to build those kinds of things.

But (and this is what I find interesting) the oral traditions that go back (in what we call north America) go back 15k years or more don't "count" under the current epistemic regime. Generally this history isn't something most of the people I run into are aware of, and when people are aware of them they come across as fables/ folk tales/ lore and not material history.

I live around a lot of native folks whose history has been often lost as they have been the victims of a vast genocide seeking to eradicate their culture. However, if you look online you can find discussions about oral histories around hunting mammoths, for instance. This has become a relevant discussion as the amount of genocide has eased up a bit and we have, for instance, native folks doing academic anthropology who can tie an archeological history of (say) large mammoth kills to specific oral narratives.

So, I get what seems to be the original point (our writing will become less legible), but I also find some irony in the idea that people with oral traditions might know a lot more about their long-term ancestors than our rather ephemeral culture.