Between Gfycat shutting down, Twitter imploding, closed communities like Discord being generally information-fragile, draconian DMCA procedures, and Tumblr removing all its adult content back in the day, it really has driven home that we're probably living a new dark age, in the Historiographic sense of "a period of time little is known about." It should be clear that massive amounts of our culture are probably going to be lost, and the remaining fragments will become increasingly difficult to understand. The hardest part of history is context; we've been translating Gilgamesh since the late 1800s and we know tons about the Akkadian language and its grammar, but we're still spilling ink on who exactly the character of Šamḫat is, because we have yet to dig up a a 7th Century BCE Wikipedia that tells us what, precisely, a ḫarimtu was. A normal sex worker? A special divine sex worker? Just a priestess? A unmarried woman who was attached to the temple of Ištar? Some other kind of woman who was sexualized by society? In English translations of Gilgamesh, her title is rendered as everything from "harlot" to "priestess." Context, be it in the form of socially understood gender roles as represented in literature, or memes and HTML links, is enormously fragile.
How much of Twitter, Tumblr, or YouTube is going to be saved in the coming decades? If some of it is, how much of the content will be coherent to future historians? How much of our creative and political output of a society is going to survive? If a historian in the year 2323 finds a surviving soyjack meme referencing the George Floyd riots, will they be able to parse it in the same way we do in 2023? Of course, societies wipe away their history all the time---in the Ancient Near East clay tablets were reused, and many calculations and writing tasks were made on necessarily ephemeral wax tablets. But our current Historiographic predicament feels somehow more absurd; we have the technology and resources to archive enormous amounts of information, but it is unprofitable or legally difficult to do so, so we will not.
history’s gonna look at us being like we look at the terrible emperors and kings of history, just a never ending cycle of “how did one man get enough damage to ruin things lmao dumbasses”
