> I wonder how historians of the future will look back on today's time period, knowing that we had the technology to cheaply and easily document our time period

> I wonder how historians of the future will look back on today's time period, knowing that we had the technology to cheaply and easily document our time period for the future, and that we opted not to out of short-term financial interests. People of the future will probably be very disappointed with us about a great many things that we could have done with our technology, knowledge and resources, but neglected or opted not to do out of short-term financial interests. But I don't think properly documenting our time period will be very high on that list. I'd love to be wrong. If in a few hundred years, there's people, society, culture and at some point again a level of civilisation and technology that allows them to dig back into the past, and the worst thing they'll have to say about our addiction to short-term financial interests is "aww, if only they had documented their time period better", then I ... well, the only likely scenario I can think of is if we also somehow manage to sell out severe-global-brain-damage-in-a-couple-of-centuries for our short-term financial interests (surely right now, there are some very smart people working on this very idea). No. This is what historians of the future will say if we would indeed meticulously document our current time period, and they could read about our day-to-day lives, important events, culture, media, etc.: "... they did WHAT?! while the planet was ... and the oceans were still ... they burned WHAT?! in order to be able to ... gosh well at least thanks to our ancestor's meticulous documenting, and millions of hours of video footage we can now theorize what these 'kittens' are supposed to have looked like ... mammals used to have hair?? ..." No, I think we better start deleting and encrypting our data. To save face. (small disclaimer: I am half-kidding, of course. While I am not particularly proud of the 'big picture' behaviour of my species in this particular era, we shouldn't actually try and hide our planetary blunders in shame, but indeed document them so that future civilisations can learn from us, and who knows, maybe one day can forgive us)