It is sad. There is so much history we’ll never know.
It might make you feel better to know that by the time the Library of Alexandria infamously burned, it had been in decline for years and there probably wasn’t much left there anyway.
That does help a little.
The thought of how much has been lost to time stresses me out in an existential way.
Sometimes I think with the way everything is being digitized but how you need to pay to store it… That likely we’re losing more cultural content today than ever before. Just think about all the tv shows from the 90s you can’t watch anymore. No dvd, no stream, just … Forgotten. Some things we produce today don’t even have a physical tangible form unless you’re talking about some hard drive in the cloud.
It also gives me a sense of existential dread. Or the sense of permanent loss.
I think about this all the time. And also with the loss of live TV being the norm, people aren’t being randomly exposed to older cultural touchstones unless they specifically seek it out, which makes the current culture feel more isolated.
I’m channeling this need to preserve into data hoarding now. I created a personal media server recently and have been filling it with everything I can find. Today, I found 14 old scifi/monster movies from the 50s/60s on old scratched DVDs to add, which was exciting.
Yep I grew up on amazing reruns of tv from wayyyyy before my time. It’s hard for me to find it to watch today. And surely my kids will not even have the opportunity. The thought kills me.
I think the BBC or CBC archives are interesting. It’s also interesting to hear about what they lost due to lack of preservation from previous times.
Yeah, so far almost all of our storage media are extremely ephemeral compared to papyrus, stone tablets or even just paper. I seriously doubt whether a normal harddrive will still be readable in 100 years. So far our solution is to just keep copying, but it’s not hard to imagine that at some point, some calamity will wipe it all out (global natural disaster, computer virus, world gets taken over by authoritarian governments who want to rewrite history) or maybe future people just stop caring for a while and stop copying. It basically happened after the fall of the roman empire, paper books don’t last millenia - you needed to keep copying them, by hand, to preserve them, and in that time they didn’t have the resources for preserving the large body of books that existed in Rome. Plus, literacy in general declined considerably.
Well, never say never. Troy was a myth until a madlad actually found it.
