No, it's not, because we live in a literal information age, where a large portion of the population dedicates their waking hours to maintaining the world's amassed information, and you guys act like in the future people will just find random hard drives lying around and not have a clue.
Hello. The ancient world and the medieval world had scribes who spent practically all their time on text archival. Nevertheless many texts we know of and would like to read are lost and there are numerous texts only known because someone turned up a forgotten scroll/codex/papyrus somewhere.
Even the Old Testament (specifically the book of Joshua) makes reference to texts which are now lost and you'd think somebody would have cared to preserve those.
>where a large portion of the population dedicates their waking hours to maintaining the world's amassed information,
And they're doing a terrible job. Look at how fast link-rot makes websites useless. Look at how fast interactive websites built not even 10 years ago using modern technologies at the time (flash) are becoming impossible to run, especially if they depended on a server-side component returning data from a server that no longer exists.
It's already extremely difficult to get data off of a 50 year-old computer. Based on evidence so far, once the people die off that actually used them, it doesn't look good for retrieving information from them in the future if other hard drives are found.
Yet we can easily look at a picture developed 100 years ago and understand it without any special technology. Same with books printed 200 years ago.
The "information age" is only about generating and disseminating information as quickly as possible. Very little care is given to preserving for any extended period of time.
> Very little care is given to preserving for any extended period of time.
For some stuff, yeah. But there are specific archive-oriented system designs and storage formats made from the ground up for independent access. The hard working employees of national digital archives, museums, aerospace, and basic research see the importance of re-usable, re-verifiable, high quality data. "Digital Permanence" is an achievable goal [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_permanence].
My personal opinion is that we likely overvalue some of the fluff on YouTube, from a generational perspective... Losing things not forward-encoded to the sands of time like so many cultural touchstones before them is a natural part of the creative destruction of culture. 250 years from now, even a massive movement/moment like "Motown" will have been worn down to a nub of understanding. I think that's good, because it'll make room for new stuff. No one cares about our vacation slides ;)
Do we really? The last decade or so sure appears to be about reinventing wheels more than everything else, both as a generational motto and as an incentive for cloud businesses. Not only has preservation and forward compatibility of Web content been a non-priority, it's being actively worked against and cheered at with major content outlets using JavaScript-only sites, and many projects turning to JavaScript-heavy approaches even for content-oriented sites. We peaked around 2005 or so in our collective efforts to recognize the value of standards in information processing and preservation. Doing regular HTML sites is considered old-school and on the verge of becoming a forgotten craft with newcomers fixated to look at frameworks.
The irony is that HTML and SGML already operate at a higher level than frameworks and JSON, much in the same way that SQL operates at a higher level of abstraction than record-oriented ORMs.
