In a thousand years, will historians regard today as the digital dark ages?
Considering the proliferation of AI-generated slop, as well as the lines between satire and reality being blurred, I wonder if future historians will have a harder time understanding what was really going on.
My oh my. Check out Mr. Optimist over here thinking that they'll be time to be "historians" in between scavenging for scraps and battling the nuclear mutants for the last bottle of fresh water at the bombed out Tesco.
A “dark age” is really just one where records didn’t survive, not that it was particularly bad. This usually follows a breakdown of power structures but the real loss is that we can’t know what happened.
I’m worried that transitioning so much to fragile digital technology could result in massive amounts of knowledge and culture being inaccessible, like that guy’s hard drive full of Bitcoin.
And it’s not just all of society that will be lost, but family history as well. Photographs and letters survive a long, long time. But without strict preservation and keeping old formats alive my grandkids won’t be able to flip through old photos of my family like I can with an old photo album.
I suspect it will be considered the Lunatic Age or the Misinformation Age or the Willfully Ignorant Age or something like that, since its most distinctive characteristic, in retrospect, is likely to be the oddity that the creation of the most efficient and comprehensive information-sharing system the world has yet seen led pretty much directly to a worldwide epidemic of ignorance, stupidity, irrationality, and insanity.