Throughout history we’ve generally moved towards ever more ephemeral storage media. Stone tablets > clay > paper > etched vinyl > magnetic tape > hard disks > solid state memory, and a bunch more I’m not remembering or not aware of (and there are some that have made extremely long lives their purpose, but they’re not generally in common use, see the etched gold records in Voyager I).

Arguably, what actually survives is only what a civilization values enough to go back and put into its longer lifespan storage media, it’s only really in the modern era of mass-production and mass-media that the desire to preserve everything has popped up.

I’m very nostalgia-driven, and I still consume a lot of the media I did as a kid, but my Jellyfin and Kavita servers aren’t meant to represent things I believe should be preserved for others, just for myself.

I’ve visited the Internet Archive several times (I used to live on 3rd and California, so it was a 5 minute walk), but I think their original purpose of especially preserving the “old internet” blogs and forums and whatnot has somewhat lost its purpose now. It doesn’t archive the mediums where most internet interaction takes place now, like Discord, and it hasn’t for a while (even twitter in its heyday wasn’t being backed up unless you manually requested a tweet be saved).

There are micro-cultures that absolutely are going to disappear entirely from our cultural record once they become defunct, but that’s always been true, and I don’t think the kinds of cultural records this article is about are really part of our larger “culture” in a meaningful way. MTV News? Gawker? How about SubSim.com and NoMutantsAllowed (2 game-specific forums I’m part of)? Does our proverbial Library of Alexandria really need to remember those existed?