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I often wonder how future generations are going to view the past. For us we can only really see footage and pictures a little over a century in the past (and ex

by simias 6y ago

I often wonder how future generations are going to view the past. For us we can only really see footage and pictures a little over a century in the past (and exponentially more as we near the present) but 2000 years from now, should humanity make it that far, people will be able to watch some of your tiktok videos. They'll even probably be able to read this very comment (modulo some translation software probably). Can you imagine if we could watch millions and millions of hours of romans doing mundane things? Of vikings giving cooking tips? Of ancient mesopothamians freestyling on some ancient instruments? Our vision of the past would be radically different I think. We're at the beginning of an entirely new era of human history, where future humans will be able to analyse the most mundane aspects of our existences documented thoroughly online. I wonder how it's going to influence languages and cultures. Can you imagine following a video of a recipe recorded 700 years ago for instance? That'd be wild, yet it's probably going to become commonplace in the future. Meanwhile I feel weird watching century old photos and videos because I can't help thinking "everybody I see here is now dead".

gen220 6y ago
Now I can’t stop feeling bad for the poor soul in 4020, trying to reconstruct “World’s Best Banana Bread” from Allrecipes through the inter generational strata of autoplaying ads and scroll jacking pop ups, only to find that the recipe’s reviews were all bot generated, and that the recipe’s 10-paragraph lead-in inspirational story apparently is the ingredients list, since none can be found.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  They’ll also probably run into trouble getting the correct bananas. Someone following a century old banana-centric recipe today would struggle with that.
konjin 6y ago
I think people will become even more willfully blind because 'people in the past were gross'. You can see that on a lot of forums where anything from before 2000 is viewed with suspicion because it isn't lgbtqia+ friendly. Funnily enough that's how a lot of ancient culture was lost in the middle ages because heresy and paganism.
ashtonkem 6y ago
Maybe. There's actually a theory running around that we're living in a digital dark age. Here's how the theory goes. Dark ages (a now antiquated term) aren't defined by a lack of records being created, it's defined by the lack of records making it to the modern era. That can happen one of two ways; either records aren't being created due to the fragmentation of existing states, or records are created but they either degrade or are not readable in the future. While we are creating records at an unbelievable pace, there's an open question how long they'll be readable. Most of our data is stored on sensitive equipment that requires fairly sophisticated maintenance. So long as our society continues mostly uninterrupted, we can keep adding new data and have it for the future. And while there is some risk of future file formats being hard to read, basic images and what not should be readable forever. But it doesn't take a very long interruption to our social structure for these systems to begin to fail, and left alone for centuries most of the data storage mechanisms we use would lose all their data. Even DVDs break down in a few decades, if we went through a serious civil war or something on-par with the breakup of the roman empire, it's possible that most of the records that would survive into the next millenia might be paper records.
marc_abonce 6y ago
I think most of today's data will be lost way before then, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age In fact, this already happens all the time when websites go out of business or purge data either by policy or even by accident. On top of my head: Megaupload, Geocties, Myspace, Tumblr and Fotolog have lost massive amounts of data for different reasons. Also, I don't think most people (non-historians) will care that much about all the stuff that does survive from our time. For example, apparently we do have recipes from ancient Rome: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/233472.html https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/233472.html

by simias 6y ago

gen220 6y ago

Now I can’t stop feeling bad for the poor soul in 4020, trying to reconstruct “World’s Best Banana Bread” from Allrecipes through the inter generational strata of autoplaying ads and scroll jacking pop ups, only to find that the recipe’s reviews were all bot generated, and that the recipe’s 10-paragraph lead-in inspirational story apparently is the ingredients list, since none can be found.

rsynnott 6y ago
They’ll also probably run into trouble getting the correct bananas. Someone following a century old banana-centric recipe today would struggle with that.

konjin 6y ago

I think people will become even more willfully blind because 'people in the past were gross'. You can see that on a lot of forums where anything from before 2000 is viewed with suspicion because it isn't lgbtqia+ friendly. Funnily enough that's how a lot of ancient culture was lost in the middle ages because heresy and paganism.

ashtonkem 6y ago

Maybe. There's actually a theory running around that we're living in a digital dark age. Here's how the theory goes. Dark ages (a now antiquated term) aren't defined by a lack of records being created, it's defined by the lack of records making it to the modern era. That can happen one of two ways; either records aren't being created due to the fragmentation of existing states, or records are created but they either degrade or are not readable in the future. While we are creating records at an unbelievable pace, there's an open question how long they'll be readable. Most of our data is stored on sensitive equipment that requires fairly sophisticated maintenance. So long as our society continues mostly uninterrupted, we can keep adding new data and have it for the future. And while there is some risk of future file formats being hard to read, basic images and what not should be readable forever. But it doesn't take a very long interruption to our social structure for these systems to begin to fail, and left alone for centuries most of the data storage mechanisms we use would lose all their data. Even DVDs break down in a few decades, if we went through a serious civil war or something on-par with the breakup of the roman empire, it's possible that most of the records that would survive into the next millenia might be paper records.

marc_abonce 6y ago

I think most of today's data will be lost way before then, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age In fact, this already happens all the time when websites go out of business or purge data either by policy or even by accident. On top of my head: Megaupload, Geocties, Myspace, Tumblr and Fotolog have lost massive amounts of data for different reasons. Also, I don't think most people (non-historians) will care that much about all the stuff that does survive from our time. For example, apparently we do have recipes from ancient Rome: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/233472.html https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/233472.html