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Comment by rappatic | Hacker News Reader

It's so interesting to me that fundamental ways of life like this can go nearly undocumented save passing references. We know a lot more about the annals of Greek history, for example, because that's what was written down. Ekirch took years to rediscover all these references to biphasic sleep because it was so fundamentally normal that historic writers never thought to focus on it. Now, with our obsessive encyclopedic documentation, it's unlikely that future generations will forget our ways of life.

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I think that future generations may forget most details of our way of life. However, as you said, it won't be due to lack of a historical record, but instead it will be due to a lack of interest in uneventful details combined with a plethora of information. I think with history we often have no clue about certain details even though the evidence is right in front of us; it's just not something we find interesting.

I've been reading the book Debt by David Graeber, and it went a lot of places I didn't expect. I suspect a lot of things we would take interest in are just not written down, or not commonly explored. For example, it was common for people to visit all their neighbors each day. It was also common for people to give each other gifts, not too large or too small or too equal to form a community.

> it was common for people to visit all their neighbors each day.

I am sure there is some regional variability, but at least in these parts you can still see that habit ingrained in those now around 80 years of age or older. But it seems to quickly taper off in anyone younger. By the time you get to my generation it is effectively unheard of.

As an example, think about how some alien visitors might try to piece together how we live day-to-day by watching TV shows and movies and reading whatever books they manage to dig up. The only way they'll even know we have bathrooms and take a crap there is if they find books or other archives detailing toilet diagrams, bathroom design, etc. If they just watch movies and TV, they'll think we somehow never have to expel waste, even though we obviously eat a lot as proven by how much screen time eating gets.

> I think that future generations may forget most details of our way of life.

Oh no what will future generations do without doomscrolling.

It would be a loss IMO if future generations never knew that we even engaged in doomscrolling (or to what extent). Of all things you’d want future generations to learn from, maladaptive behavior that’s so widespread as to be hardly noticed in daily life seem high on the list.

Caveat that doomscrolling specifically maybe isn’t a great example given that we are collecting a ton of data about it, we’re mostly just ignoring it.

How well doomscrolling and were it happens is documented in historic documents? Just food for thought...

You might be projecting there.

Oooh, and projecting. Will they even know what they've lost?

(tongue firmly in cheek, I hope you understand)

> our obsessive encyclopedic documentation

...will bitrot away in 50 years.

In 1000, future historians will probably view our period as a curious dark age. (Where are all the books and the monuments??)

The government-run national libraries (think Library of Congress and similar) at least have the mandate for long-term archival.

Bitrot isn't as much a concern any more - we have data formats worked out these days, with well defined specifications and open standards (PDF/A), so basically as long as computers keep operating on the fundamental principle of bits and bytes, our documents will always be able to be read, and for virtually all popular data storage formats there is open source software that can, should the need arise, be run in an emulator.

In fact, future historians should have it easier to understand our times, given that machines can actually sift through data at speed and you don't need humans to tediously take and scan brittle paper, and a lot of data is replicated so often across the planet that even a nuclear war should leave at least one copy alive in contrast to earlier times where wars, fires and natural disasters would routinely wipe out entire nations' memories. (Doesn't stop people from trying though, just look at the book burnings in Ukraine committed by Russia)

The dark era IMHO more concerns pre-MS Windows computing and everything related to gaming. The former because a lot of data there (hole punch cards...) literally rotted away, the latter because of decades worth of homegrown architectures, all kinds of DRM, a lack of obligations for publishers to submit DRM-free copies and copies of the server backend code to national libraries, and the current "trend" towards e-stores for games instead of physical media.

> The dark era IMHO more concerns pre-MS Windows computing and everything related to gaming.

It's much worse today, because most of the so-called "archives" are actually stored somewhere "in the cloud", and are one serious economic crisis away from being deleted at the press of a button. (Also an even bigger problem is all the proprietary or unmaintained data formats. We already have issues maintaining this stack of bullshit today, and only a couple decades have passed. Maintaining this for centuries is out of the question.)

You really think this will be an issue? Storage just keeps growing? The entire history of internet will probably be stored in millions of copies on some rice-sized containers somewhere. :D

I agree, it’s kind of mind blowing when simple things like this are discovered—very humbling. (If the research can be trusted ofc.)

> Now, with our obsessive encyclopedic documentation, it's unlikely that future generations will forget our ways of life.

I’m not so sure. One, due to increasing reliance on bits for that documentation. But also two, because we already find it incredibly hard to truly imagine the ways of the world just a few generations back.

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