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We can’t judge what is important and what is not. This is a job for the future historians in a millenium. What historians really need is accounts of how regula
by Joeri 6y ago
We can’t judge what is important and what is not. This is a job for the future historians in a millenium.
What historians really need is accounts of how regular people went about their business, without a filter applied by the one recording that account. The internet archive is an excellent resource for this, but only if it is preserved.
Previous ages failed to record what was needed to properly understand that age, not because they lacked the capacity to do so, but because they didn’t consider mundane things worth recording.
- Kye 6y agoSeriously. It runs contrary to people's intuition, but things we think of as boring now are what historians will care about more than famous, well-preserved, and widely-replicated materials. The Stoics were always going to survive into the 21st century, but the graffiti on walls would tell you a lot more about the politics and culture of the time than one well-off scholar's view. All those long-gone personal sites are the graffiti on the wall, and we have a copy of a lot of it. I learn a lot about things I was only vaguely aware of in the '90s from random magazine clippings/media people like Jason Scott and Anatoly Shashkin share. https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic https://twitter.com/textfiles https://twitter.com/textfiles So much of this is in the Internet Archive. Think of what it means to someone 100 years from now trying to piece together an understanding of this era. How much could you find from just 5-10 years ago without it? Most of those websites are offline, the magazines long gone, the companies absorbed into another with no interest in history.