[antonymy]

I definitely worry about the future of scholarship as our print media becomes more and more fragmented and hidden. It's not necessarily about ensuring essential knowledge is carried forward, but rather a "sense of the past". In researching history, the further back you go the more fragmented and unreliable your sources usually become. So it becomes harder and harder to figure out the broad sweep of these past cultures, what life was like, the things they believed, and so on. And I think we're doing that to our present historical moment by deleting the recent past and creating a continuous present.

We have the Internet Archive, we have Wikipedia page histories, but everything else is ephemeral. If Archive.org ever goes the way of the Library of Alexandria, we'll have lost irreplaceable knowledge of the web itself, and the cultures that existed on it. It will live on only in living memory, but this is also transient, and soon nobody will live who remembers what this time period was like. Wikipedia will not reflect it, you'd have to dig through page histories to find fragments, like historians and archaeologists sifting through ancient manuscripts and ruins for clues.

A potential dark age is forming, and avoiding it right now hinges entirely on the continued efforts of two donation-funded organizations, one of which makes it increasingly harder to view the past, the other facing legal disputes that could see it shut down. I think we need to make archiving the present important, so it does not become a mysterious, inscrutable past for our descendants.

[Beached]

while I have the same general concerns, both wikipedia and archive.org have offline backup and running options for free. and, they are surprisingly small. all one has to do is write a simple script to auto download these backups daily/weekly/whatever and you can access all that info of your solar powered raspberry pi.

while I think there could be a short period where this info is largely unavailable, I don't believe it will be lost forever. if the Internet goes away, once some new Internet like technology comes around to replace it, these data repos will likely get out back up very quickly. just a matter of how long that blip is

[cxr]

Technologists and those in an adjacent professional class (which should account for a lot here on HN) should also do their part to help make sure that the present is easily archivable.