> 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.