Scientists warn we may be creating a 'digital dark age'

[phantom000]

Basically, in 75 to a 100 years perhaps 90% of all digital information could become unreadable due to degradation or changes in software that makes old files unreadable.

To say nothing of the possibility of the collapse of civilization and the loss of the internet as a whole.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technolo ... Bmkt5R&amp

What is funny is this is a theory i had about Star Trek; why the Enterprise had to travel back in time for historical research. With more and more data being stored digitally with out physical copies most of it was lost during the third world war and so very little is known about what happened.

[Madner Kami]

The thought that modern data storage is somehow less lasting and faster degrading than old media is something that always amused me. Try reading a book in medieval english. You'll struggle to even read something that was written just 200 years ago, in some languages, you'd be hard-pressed to find something that is readable and just 100 years old.
The only way to preserve data sensibly is, to repeatedly copy and linguistically update it during the copying process over and over and over and over again. Guess what we can do with little to no effort today? Guess what took years before the printing press was invented. Guess what takes seconds today, while it took hours once the printing press was invented. Not to even think about the availability of data nowadays. Practically everything is within reach of a 5 second Google-Search, while trying to even find an obscure book or import a say, japanese music CD was a monumental task just 25 years ago.

[TGLS]

You'll struggle to even read something that was written just 200 years ago, in some languages, you'd be hard-pressed to find something that is readable and just 100 years old.

I don't know; Shakespeare is still pretty readable and that's on the order of 400 years old.

The only way to preserve data sensibly is, to repeatedly copy and linguistically update it during the copying process over and over and over and over again. Guess what we can do with little to no effort today?

I'm pretty sure that a linguistic update is still pretty difficult. And if you just blindly update, you might end up with a version of Tale of Two Cities that begins, "It was teh win times, it was teh lose times". You have to be careful with translation.

[PerrySimm]

And if you just blindly update, you might end up with a version of Tale of Two Cities that begins, "It was teh win times, it was teh lose times". You have to be careful with translation.

Don't be so dismissive of this goldmine you just stumbled on. You can use every warmed-over cliché you want if it's young-adult science fiction.

[Deledrius]

The thought that modern data storage is somehow less lasting and faster degrading than old media is something that always amused me. Try reading a book in medieval english. You'll struggle to even read something that was written just 200 years ago, in some languages, you'd be hard-pressed to find something that is readable and just 100 years old.
The only way to preserve data sensibly is, to repeatedly copy and linguistically update it during the copying process over and over and over and over again. Guess what we can do with little to no effort today? Guess what took years before the printing press was invented. Guess what takes seconds today, while it took hours once the printing press was invented. Not to even think about the availability of data nowadays. Practically everything is within reach of a 5 second Google-Search, while trying to even find an obscure book or import a say, japanese music CD was a monumental task just 25 years ago.

Survivorship bias leads people to assume a lot more has survived from the past in written form than actually has (and that the quality of what has survived is legible).

The real danger here is that, due to legal restrictions and the technological restraints giving companies a unilateral ability to write their own, some things cannot be copied. Many things are made extremely difficult due to DRM.

Sure, the big stuff will be backed up no matter what, and the really obscure stuff probably isn't protected at all, but everything in between risks being lost. This isn't due to an inherent infeasibility in digital storage, or formats, but because of active choices being made to prevent preservation.

That's what is most maddening about all of this to me. The argument about dataloss is such a short-sighted and naïve one, and is ultimately self-defeating because it affirms and pre-supposes the wretched state of the internet being more and more centralized in the hands of people who want to build silos of control that contain only and exclusively their own works. We could have a decentralized backup of everything, always, forever; those necessary conversions could be made by anyone who cares at any time. But that would require us to stop forcing the post-scarcity digital world's round peg into the artificial-scarcity Intellectual Property world's square hole.

Anyone actually doing the good work for the world in archiving and cataloging things has to do so at least partially in the underground, because the the ability to do so legally has been lobbied away from the common good.

I'm sure this sounds like some kind of techno-anarchist-free-information nonsense to some people, and I admit it's an extreme view (at least from the perspective of our contemporary capitalist society) but it seems like we as a species could be doing a lot better even trying to find a compromise... but we just aren't. Not even remotely. The cultural robber-barons are consistently gaining ground.

As an amusing side-note: It's struck me in recent years that a possible explanation for Star Trek's use of classic music and literature to the exclusion of nearly anything modern may be due to WWIII. Nothing that was locked behind DRM survived once the key vaults were all destroyed. Over a century of culture was lost beyond recovery to the people of Star Trek thanks to the Ferengi-like business models of "ancient" humans.

[Madner Kami]

I'm sure this sounds like some kind of techno-anarchist-free-information nonsense to some people, and I admit it's an extreme view (at least from the perspective of our contemporary capitalist society) but it seems like we as a species could be doing a lot better even trying to find a compromise... but we just aren't. Not even remotely. The cultural robber-barons are consistently gaining ground.

It doesn't sound like techno-anarchist nonsense to me, because this is the exact case. Copyright protection is, by it's very nature, the antithesis to data archivation. Copying and, ideally, spreading data is the only way to lastingly preserve data, as I pointed out earlier. A system that is designed to prevent the copy and spread of data is obviously going to disrupt the process of "data survival", for lack of a better word.

Naturally, copyright protection does serve a sensible purpose and needs to exist, imo, but protecting a piece of music from going public domain taking a houndred years? What for? People likely stoppd listening to it about 50 years ago and the perma-rotation on radio isn't going to entice people to start copying it once the copyright protection lapsed an additional 50 years later either. There's no good point to stuff like that.

As an amusing side-note: It's struck me in recent years that a possible explanation for Star Trek's use of classic music and literature to the exclusion of nearly anything modern may be due to WWIII. Nothing that was locked behind DRM survived once the key vaults were all destroyed. Over a century of culture was lost beyond recovery to the people of Star Trek thanks to the Ferengi-like business models of "ancient" humans.

Great theory. But given how Star Trek usually acts towards it's "ancient times", it's much more likely that they declared that the culture itself was responsible for the war in the first place and thus is shunned and exorcised. You know, R̶o̶c̶k̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶R̶o̶l̶l̶ ̶J̶a̶z̶z̶ ̶M̶o̶v̶i̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶T̶V̶s̶ ̶H̶e̶a̶v̶y̶ ̶M̶e̶t̶a̶l̶ ̶C̶o̶m̶p̶u̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶G̶a̶m̶e̶s̶ ̶T̶h̶e̶ ̶I̶n̶t̶e̶r̶n̶e̶t̶ something something recent that old people don't understand the appeal of caused the downfall of society.

[Robovski]

Copyright law is super frustrating and is made ever worse by a company who fears what will happen when their 90 year old mouse creation ends up in the public domain despite being a company that built an empire on public domain material. I'm all for an artist having rights and making a living on their creations, but there is also a public good to be considered.

[Darth Wedgius]

I imagine we will be losing information at a greater rate than ever before in the history of our species. But mostly because we are generating so much information so quickly, and much of it simply isn't very important long-term.

My prescription for an antibiotic 22 years ago? There's a slim chance that it could be valuable within the next 50 years or so (e.g., epidemiology studies of long-term side effects), but it's loss probably doesn't matter that much. That really cool fan fiction where Captain Kirk and Indiana Jones help Batman defeat Darth Vader? History can survive its loss. Unless I wrote it, in which case that leaves humanity forever bereft of the true heights it could have reached.

What if we lost Star Trek? All of it. Every episode, every movie, every script, every tape, ever ViewMaster disc, every musical composition, every novel, every fan fic where the new ensign saves the Enterprise, every drawing of Spock's younger and smarter sister who Kirk falls in love with, all of it. Star Trek hasn't been worthless; people have gone into science and engineering because of it, and maybe, just maybe, with so many people considering aliens, perhaps some of us don't see each other as alien as we might have. I can't think of a setting that's likely to have had a bigger effect on us. Some would call such a loss incalculable. But if it disappeared tomorrow (damn it, Q!), I think life for 99+% of people would go on 99+% the same as it would have otherwise.

As far as the schematics for the first PDP-11, the blueprints for the Model T, the source code for SpaceWar!, the real original recipe with its 13 herbs and spices... I'm OK if all that is lost. I mean, I'd rather that didn't happen, but if it happened I wouldn't really be upset, either.

[SiskosMuthaFknPmphnd]

What if we lost Star Trek? All of it. Every episode, every movie, every script, every tape, ever ViewMaster disc, every musical composition, every novel, every fan fic where the new ensign saves the Enterprise, every drawing of Spock's younger and smarter sister who Kirk falls in love with, all of it.

Isn't that the plot to a Futurama episode?

As an amusing side-note: It's struck me in recent years that a possible explanation for Star Trek's use of classic music and literature to the exclusion of nearly anything modern may be due to WWIII. Nothing that was locked behind DRM survived once the key vaults were all destroyed. Over a century of culture was lost beyond recovery to the people of Star Trek thanks to the Ferengi-like business models of "ancient" humans.

They should totally make a movie about that. Some alien probe shows up to find out how its favorite TV show ended because he missed the last episode. But no one has that show because all copies of it were lost in the war. So our heroes have to go back in time to the 20th century to get some DVDs of the show to stop the alien from destroying the Earth. We'll call it "Star Trek 20: The Voyage to Blockbuster"

[Darth Wedgius]

What if we lost Star Trek? All of it. Every episode, every movie, every script, every tape, ever ViewMaster disc, every musical composition, every novel, every fan fic where the new ensign saves the Enterprise, every drawing of Spock's younger and smarter sister who Kirk falls in love with, all of it.

Isn't that the plot to a Futurama episode?

It could be. I'm probably losing nerd cred admitting it, but I've hardly watched any Futurama.

I'd watch Voyage to Blockbuster, though!