I agree with people who say this age is about to become a black hole in history, but it's not about cataclysmic collapse per se. It's about walling information

I agree with people who say this age is about to become a black hole in history, but it's not about cataclysmic collapse per se. It's about walling information in so it can only be used (ephemerally and in exchange for money) but not usefully retrieved and replicated elsewhere. It's "death by cloud". The only way to safeguard information is by replicating it. Nature illustrates this very well: only living genes are preserved, and preservation depends on being able to make many copies and modifications, too. People wonder why we didn't have an industrial revolution in antiquity, when clearly the knowledge was almost there. My pet theory about this involves walled gardens. If you keep all the worthwhile information locked away in the library of Alexandria, it's not going to survive. To survive, it has to be truly accessible to a huge group of people. Even the supposedly-open Wikipedia is part of the problem: between rampant deletionism and the surprising difficulty of maintaining your own up-to-date offline snapshot, it's as much of a black hole as many other walled websites. In many respects, an rsync-like API would be the single most important innovation Wikipedia could offer to ensure the data on it survives. But like almost every other organization, they seem to be focused on merely securing their organizational shell, as opposed to acting in the best interest of their data. If you want to contribute to keeping our shared memory alive, burying a few megabytes in some soon-forgotten crypt under Austria isn't the most promising way to do it. Instead, do this: opt out of the cloud wherever you can, or at least make secondary local storage a must-have criterium for as many of your services as possible. Don't just use Spotify, have music on your hard drive. Don't just use Netflix, have movies on your hard drive. Have copies of all your work, all your documents, all your emails saved on your hard drive. I have an archive disk with all my most important stuff on it, and every year I transfer it to a new drive. I plan to do this for the rest of my life, hopefully disk capacities will keep up with my needs (so it fits on a single drive). If push comes to shove, I can probably "survive" comfortably as far as my data goes if the internet stopped working tomorrow. If enough people did this, our information could survive an arbitrary disaster, from as small as the termination of an information service to as large as a civilization-ending supervolcano eruption.