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And of that 1%, so much of it is single-source material with little corroboration. A lot of it reads like regal ass-kissing, settling petty personal scores, or TMZ-level gossip.
Looking at you Herodotus and Procopius.
Damn, were could I read my repressed 14th century nun smut
Only 1% of contemporary literature is worth surviving so I’m not super concerned
That just means only 1% of ancient literature that was worth surviving did survive, and the other 99% of surviving literature isn’t worth its own survival.
There is loss of data over time as it is edited. There’s so much information, so much written down, so many images, that it can’t possibly all be saved. So people decide what to keep and what gets discarded. And it happens over and over again as time progresses. A lot of old material is even worse off just because it got destroyed, rotted away to illegibility, or just got buried.
That will happen to everything about us as well, except compounded by technological barriers. Modern media like HDDs, SSDs, CDs, and even paper will become unreadable either by degradation or future technological incompatibility - assuming civilization exists in any modern sense in the future.
I have had the thought “If I had a time machine, I’d go back to before the library at Alexandria burned the first time.” But then immediately after was like “…Too bad I can’t read latin.”
That’s ok, I think most of it would have been in Greek anyway, so you’re good.
I posted this the other day but I think the words scared people away:
Their historical/cultural loss is probably immesurable. Literary, on the other hand - normal distribution applies and significant amount of those 99% were average or worse.
This does indeed hurt. Then I think about the forever memory of the internet and how everything ever put on it will likely stay forever, and the terrible terrible content on it. Then it hurts a little less.
The internet absolutely does not have a forever memory. But you can contribute to the internet’s preservation by running an Archive Team Warrior.
so many things that were once on the internet are now lost
its only forever for popular stuff
Go find me wrathbait fanfics then.
Except the impermanence of the internet under varying conditions such as repressive censorship by oligarchs/fascists, rising operating costs, or even maintainers simply losing interest is rapidly showing itself.
“The internet is forever” may have been wishful thinking 😭
Yeah, the internet hasn’t even been around long enough that the original devs have started dying off.
Imagine in a 100 years when literally no project is still run by its original maintainer. What’s gonna happen then?
There’s gonna be a really strange transition period in about 40-50 years when this starts becoming an issue…
That thought never considered sociatal collapse or plain lack of backups.
How many backup archives of the internet archive do we got going? 😭
Like 0 full copies? And internet archive itself archived maybe a percent of everything.
And who’s archiving all the stuff that the Internet Archive, being a ‘white hat’ organization that respects robots.txt, omits?
IA also succumbs to pressure/legal/government threats which hurts.
I think ghostarchive has some stuff at least
Except it’s not forever. It could definitely go away, and I would bet that it will.
I mean yeah, all the electricity could stop working and then how would we get on the internet? I like to think about this scenario sometimes, how there would just be all this hardware laying around with all this data on it and no way to access it.
People who have solar won’t have to worry about that too much.
The mainline infrastructure might go down, but as long as you can provide your own power and have your own setup, anything you archive and backup will still be accessible to you.
Then people can link routers to create mesh-style intranets and pass around USBs to share data between “islands”. Maybe even use long-range point-to-point links to connect meshes in a wider area.
Life uh… finds a way…
I still mourn the fire of the Library of Alexandria as the symbol of such a loss. Heartbreaking
Don’t worry the odds of anything in that collection surviving the fall of the Roman Empire is unlikely even if it wasn’t burned down.
We lost so many books then because after the empire fell no one had the resources to preserve and copy all the works. They eventually just rotted away
I mean, there’s the Roman empire that didn’t fall (Eastern) and the Islamic world that preserved a lot of that shit. The Renaissance in Italy was kicked off by Greek scholars fleeing the fall of Constantinople bringing copies of Plato with them.
The Eastern Roman Empire didn’t have the resources and experienced a slow decline.
You are right though they were able to preserve some of the texts and knowledge, but they lacked the resources to preserve it all.
Likewise the rise of the Islamic world was simply too late to preserve these texts from antiquity. They certainly had the resources to do so at their height.
The issue is it only takes a century maybe two if conditions are good for books to rot away. Pest infestations combined with a lack of climate control does not preserve books. Especially the types of papers and bindings then were quite susceptible
I wonder if we’re living in a future dark age because so much data is going to rot away. People are trying to copy things off rotting floppies and CDs and such. A lot of digital knowledge will be lost if we keep it on media that requires electricity, power, a specific OS or computer program, etc to access. On the other hand, we still print a lot of material on paper.
Small example: in my job, there is a well known first application of some stuff. That was a groundbreaking program written in the 70s. Most copies got lost/broken, one is known to remain, but anyways no one had a compatible OS, so it is effectively unusable. (Don’t ask more details, I don’t know them)
The Renaissance in Italy was kicked off by Greek scholars fleeing the fall of Constantinople bringing copies of Plato with them.
That is largely a myth. Just as the great fire of the library of Alexandria.
You’re telling me that thousands of years from now people are gonna be missing out on the fan fiction that an 11 year old wrote about Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron?
doubt
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Rough estimate based on references to other (now lost) works in (extant) ancient works.
Also including the fact that many ancient works we only have part of, with large amounts of numbered chapters (or equivalent) missing.
Take the current amount of ancient literature, multiply it by 100. EZ
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On top of that, how much of it accurately reflects the perception of the average person of the time? In thousands of years, will there be nothing left of us in literature but a tiny fraction of the perspective constructed by the ultra wealthy and their followers? Kinda makes me want to write on glass plates and bury them somewhere. I guess I’d also have to translate it into a few languages to increase the chances of it being interpretable in the distant future.
Not a week goes by without me mourning the loss of Alexandria and Nalanda…
And Baghdad
