I think it’s more that there’s no will to do anything about it. As a piece earlier this week pointed out nothing about tech is genuinely inevitable[0]. There are humans making decisions to keep the snowball gathering speed.
This reminds me of when everyone was saying that "everything on the internet is written in ink" - especially during the height of social media in the 2010s. So imagine my surprise in the first half of the 2020s when tons of content starts getting effectively deleted from the internet - either through actual deletion or things like link rot. Heck, I literally just said "the height of social media" - even that has pulled back.
So yeah, remember that tech ultimately serves people. And it only happens so long as people are willing to enable it to happen.
I suspect almost all of that data still exists - it just isn’t readily available.
In the desperate end-game of this most recent round of “it’s shit, but what if we collected enough of it?” every last bit of human generated content will be resurrected.
That’s a fair point. But I’ve learned from my own life experience to factor in things like Hanlon’s Razor and the Dunning-Kruger Effect when it comes to technology anymore. Especially post-Covid tech.
In this case, while it’s totally possible for this sort of data to still exist somewhere, I think the chances of it surfacing again in any accessible format are rare - purely because of the overall stupidity of the system. Keeping data that “alive” for decades is a skill in itself that seems to only happen in a heavily subsidized “perfect” economic times (at least to the outside observer). Once the going gets tough, there isn’t really any business value to saving the data and it likely gets deleted.
This reminds me of when everyone was saying that "everything on the internet is written in ink" - especially during the height of social media in the 2010s. So imagine my surprise in the first half of the 2020s when tons of content starts getting effectively deleted from the internet - either through actual deletion or things like link rot. Heck, I literally just said "the height of social media" - even that has pulled back.
So yeah, remember that tech ultimately serves people. And it only happens so long as people are willing to enable it to happen.