Inspired by the post about the hieroglyphs the one dude hoped would last forever.
People always talk about future historians being confused at memes and old forums, but surely a lot of catastrophic events could just wipe out the internet wholesale, right? If something REALLY COOL like a giant meteor wiped out everybody, what if aliens came along and were deeply confused that our culture seems to end randomly in the mid 2010s, subsumed by an internet whose only remaining shreds are references in big scientific studies?
The history textbooks on our dumb asses would surely read “and the humans all talked into screens and used “hyper links” to share information and opinions. Very little is known about this obscure human ritual as no evidence can be found of its existence beyond scattered references in ancient texts contemporary to its existence.”
Thinkin bout the impermanence of the internet rn
“They seemed to have developed a communication system which probably connected all the settlements of the planet. Almost all data storage technology was obliterated by a solar event millions of years ago, but archaeologists have discovered scattered hardware media surviving in subsurface dwellings. While most data is beyond recovery, the dozens of known data samples conforming to recognizable formats identified are all, invariably, pictures of quadrupedal mammals or up close images of genitalia. The meaning of this finding is under intense debate.”
a pervasive legend of the late anthropocene era seems to involve a man who, by pure reason and scientific methodology, was able to transmogrify himself into a preserved food item called a “pickle.” Our records indicate that this was the height of comedy during this time period as multiple distinct sources reference it as being the “funniest shit [they’d] ever seen”
It’s much worse than this. Digital media is not durable in any archivally/archaeologically relevant sense of the word. Magnetic tape in a bunker, maybe, but that’ll leave exoarchaeologists with mainly data about finance. Spinning rust in a data center (where most of “the internet” is) has an operational lifespan measured in single-digit years, and SSDs not substantially better. Any actual data that survives a disaster will almost certainly be unreadable without an electron microscope since all the related tech will be long gone.
Anything digital has the hard-copy shelf life of a can of tuna and our paper is acidic pulp that crumbles to dust in a few decades. How many primary documents are we carving into stone or stamping in ceramic these days?
We’ll be like the carthaginians or the etruscans and will leave barely anything legible behind
and our paper is acidic pulp that crumbles to dust in a few decades
has paper gotten significantly worse or something? books are one of the few things that seem to have a lifespan well beyond what capitalists and consumers would consider their utility
It really depends on the paper. Like you can get “archival” paper that has low lignen levels and won’t yellow and deteriorate as fast. At the other end you have like newsprint and cheap paperbacks (the pulp in pulp fiction refers to the low quality of the paper in the books) and they really don’t last. In general though, I think most of the old texts we have as books are written on parchment, which is leather. I do think there are ways to preserve paper, but it probably involves periodic maintenance and replacement and specific conditions.
That’s assuming the NSA isn’t converting snapshots of the entire internet to tape and storing it in underground bunkers
i don’t think we could produce enough tape for even a fraction of a snapshot. on top of that, there’s too much data to even start sorting through what’s worth saving and what’s just junk
God, two years ago I had an idea for a story about archaeologists in 2222 (after a huge geomagnetic storm / solar flare / whatever you call it circa 2100, among other things) trying to learn about trans culture in the 2020s by essentially diving into flooded coastal cities and trying to find old hard drives or SSDs and trying to recover the data despite the damage done to them. This just reminded me of that. It sounds like a really interesting premise but I also don’t think I have the skills to write it myself.
Alas thou must, this sounds like it fucks. Reminds me of the mac archive of a 90s trans website from a while ago.
I haven’t heard of that, please tell me about it.
Also, to be clear, that story idea was meant to be the fifth and final story in a series of short stories about trans shit in the near-ish future, of which I only wrote the first one-and-a-half stories. The first four stories were all going to be parodies of different things — Papers Please, Half-Life 2, Kin-dza-dza!, and Gurren Lagann, with individual scenes or details inspired by other things — and they would together show the gradual transformation of a fictional US state as it gets progressively more transphobic, eugenicist, and fascistic over the course of the 21st century. While each story was going to be very comedic and biting in its satire, and each story would end with some sort of victory over the oppressors… Well, the fact that things kept getting increasingly horrible just made me feel like the fifth and final story being a sort of epilogue would be a nice conclusion, even if said epilogue didn’t actually have much of anything apparent to do with the other four stories.
Also I cannot express how much I would read that. It sounds fuckin awesome <3
Rest assured, each blockchain node contains an entire copy of the blockchain. Your NFTs are safe.
Printing the blockchain on stone tablets so that archeologists can know about my apes
When I find a recipe that works I just write it down in a spiral cookbook my wife got in a buy nothing group.
Searching for recipes is such a hellscape, and it’s bound to get worse with AI telling us to put fucking glue in everything.
Something I’ve learned about the internet is that curation is actually really valuable.
Having someone whose taste you generally agree with, whose job it is to go “hey this actually sucks” or “hey this is actually good” is infinitely better than just digging through the miles of garbage that people dump out online, and that’s even from before the dead internet really kicked off.
Like if you want recipes, you’ll have an infinitely better time going to your local library and checking out an actual cookbook than you will desperately scraping through blogs.
