Lost History

Does the absence of a parts of history ever bug you? Vast swaths of history are undocumented or destroyed, unlikely to resurface. I think to Ancient Greece or Rome often when it comes to this thought. Writings, poetry, events, and countless amounts of art were lost from those eras without so much a sigh now. It's not just ignorance, there's a deliberate cultivation of ahistoricity in common knowledge. The fairweather alternative being a sort of whig history. Not to complain or even make that the point of my contention, but that does comes as another hurdle for preservation going forward. Among others, is the lack of archival standards rampant still present. Although the scariest problem to me is the hypothetical that what if the entire electronic infrastructure collapses one day or is severely damaged, and we lose what could amount to a thousand(*) years worth of lost data.

It's happening right now. Especially in the digital world history get's rewritten quick. Whenever something unsavory get's public attention all primary google hits get adjusted to the correct opinion. I've also observed well made articles that lasted for decades on wikipedia vanish entirely like that. It's not entirely lost thanks to archiving sites of course but public opinion is shaped by the adjustment. Once the new truth is established old sources are rejected as fringe nonsense. In that manner i don't think it matters much if the digital world burns. If there is something of value to be found it will be in books that aren't as easily edited.

Oh yeah, the digital revolution amounts to vastly more amounts of data generated but it's mostly in more transient forms. And government bureaucracies--long a source of good historical record--are also (albeit slowly) converting over, which means that stuff is going to be less durable. A little soon to say if it'll be enough to make up for it, but we could be in an historical dark spot because of our shifting over to data modalities that favor short-term efficiency and speed and convenience. It would be interesting to see what resources future historians use to try to piece together our era. But then again, we are for instance currently carving more words in stone than any civilization ever has before. It's just that everything is growing. Maybe the things we carve in stone are no longer especially useful--mostly tombstones with names and dates of little note--it might just be that we're generating more than enough historical reference just as a byproduct of our sheer volume of production. Hard to say at this point. But the greatest erasure of history in history was WWII. That conflict threw entire epochs of our past back into shadow. It's very underappreciated. War always eradicates our own past--it's one of the more subtly insidious aspects of war.