Future historians don't care about who was in line in the bakery this morning etc. Data that should legitimately be obscure is about personal/small scale everyday actions that could be identifying given a small sample. I'm the first one to fall into data hoarding, but we need to repeatedly acknowledge that most of the things we do are not worth being recorded, and actively not recording them (or making them easily accessible, standardized) does have a lot of value, in terms of social structure.
>Future historians don't care about who was in line in the bakery this morning etc.
They do when it turns out that a serial killer was in that line. Tracking exactly what that killer did leading up to the killing spree would be very interesting to them.
But it's very hard to track 1 person retroactively. Unless, of course, there's a nation-wide surveillance system in place.
I'm not advocating for it. I'm just saying that the parent is correct in that historians would love this information.
We will be lucky to have any future historians at all.
We're living in the middle of a dark age anyway. All our precious digital media are extremely fragile both in their capacity to be preserved, and in future generations' ability to decode them even if they are preserved. If you want historians to see something, write it on a physical object, in multiple languages.
It's hard to imagine a scenario where future historians can't even translate 2019 English. That's either an apocalypse layered over an apocalypse, or a length of time beyond any human comprehension - tens of thousands of years - of dark ages. You need to be carving in stone or baked clay in the desert to hit time spans that long.
That's fair, English is probably fine. But you'd be hard-pressed to convince me all our massive data centers are going to survive. I don't think that will even require a civilizational collapse, just a company going out of business. Imagine what a full-scale depression would do. And the drive to push everything into the cloud has only gotten started. Just look what happened with Tumblr banning adult content and blocking people from making archives. It's already getting difficult to find hardware that can read old media, and the attacks on public library funding don't help either. We're building a Tower of Babel and storing all our knowledge inside.
Yeah, but data is like... we could loose 99% of it and be just fine. With the remaining 1% the most important tech/science knowledge and a fair chunk of culture could be interpolated.
I have a huge treasure trove of my art, music, and writing from my childhood stored in stuffit archives on a Jaz drive. How much will you charge to retrieve them for me?