There's too much going on in this article and while I think some of the points are valid, others go too far.

A lot of the "cultural record" the author refers to is just digital junk. Random digital content that very few people care about, if we're being honest. Trying to hoard every bit of digital information ever produced is not the same thing as preserving "culture".

Case in point:

> Even the increasing use of ephemeral formats like Instagram Stories and WhatsApp status updates means that large portions of cultural, social, and political communication are never conserved in the first place. As a society, we can probably survive bad search results and come up with another way to schedule a sunset make-out session. But we can’t aspire to sovereignty if we can’t retain and retrieve our collective memory.

For most of human history, nobody was trying to "conserve" every cultural, social or political communication ever produced, and I fail to see how Instagram Stories and WhatsApp status updates, many of which aren't even truly broadcast publicly for all to see, are part of some imaginary "collective memory."

If you find a web page, see an Instagram Story or receive a message that's important to you, save it or take a screenshot. But let's not pretend all these things belong in a global Digital Civilizational Archives.

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jbm 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

While I dislike Instagram reels and stories, I do feel like there is almost certainly scientific studies on radicalization that would benefit from actual histories of dumb memes. I feel like that about a lot of things, really.

There probably are some important hidden discord groups that would explain the origin of many political positions. Unlike smokey meetings in scummy bars, that exists now and is on a database somewhere.

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bitwize 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

On the other hand, when modern archaeologists discover "Claudius has a small dick" graffiti on the side of some God-forsaken wall in Pompeii, they're fascinated. The presence of such graffiti adds color and texture to the civilization inhabited by Virgil and Ovid. What's just disposable background noise to us may provide context into how we lived and thought to our far-future descendants.

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ElProlactin 9 hours ago | parent [-]

> The presence of such graffiti adds color and texture to the civilization inhabited by Virgil and Ovid.

It does, but do you think that people at that time thought anywhere near as much about preserving their scribbles as we do?

I'd venture a guess that we've created more "content" since the advent of the internet than in all of human history prior, and most of it is stored on things that aren't even designed to last a human lifetime without failure.

The idea that we're going to save every piece of digital junk for posterity just isn't realistic or healthy.

> What's just disposable background noise to us may provide context into how we lived and thought to our far-future descendants.

You're right, but you're also assuming that they're going to care that much, and that we're going to survive that long.

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queenkjuul 8 hours ago | parent [-]

I think it isn't that we should save all of it, it's that we are not saving any of it. Random letters, notebooks, calendars, family photos, restaurant menus, etc have all proven useful to various historians, of which there will essentially be none from our era.

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ElProlactin 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> I think it isn't that we should save all of it, it's that we are not saving any of it. Random letters, notebooks, calendars, family photos, restaurant menus, etc have all proven useful to various historians, of which there will essentially be none from our era.

Well as far as digital letters, photos, menus, etc. are concerned, there's nothing stopping someone with the means and motivation from investing in a doomsday storage facility specifically designed to store these things for posterity. If people can do this for crypto they can do it for digital content.

As for physical items, do you know how much junk Americans have in storage units? The US self-storage industry generates over $40 billion in annual revenue. We're probably keeping more "stuff" in storage units where it has a chance of surviving a zombie apocalypse than at any point in human history.

	▲	queenkjuul 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I mean, none of that stuff in storage units is human communication, though. Nobody prints emails or text convos or insta photos. Nobody is mailing each other letters. So none of that stuff is in storage units, though plenty of it from previous generations might be. I don't necessarily think all this digital stuff is worth saving, i just see how it could be that we are essentially erasing our modern historical record by putting 100℅ of it in private data centers with no permanent records. And then you see how plenty of contemporary digital media from the last 30-40 years is actually already lost to time just in our short timeframe. I don't think acknowledging that this could be detrimental is necessarily an argument for trying to preserve all of it. We, as a society, went very rapidly from preserving a lot of it to preserving none of it. I don't see the harm in thinking about the implications of that. Nobody actively preserved letters and menus and postcards and photos, they just persisted by nature of being physical. Digital records only persist with continuous effort to preserve them. So the record for future historians will be highly curated and likely much more limited.