I'm generally pessimistic but I don't think this is true. We're still generating print information at an astounding rate. Plenty of organizations work on archiving information in various forms.
Historians will have plenty of information to sift through from this era in 500 years. Will they have a complete collection of ACM Journals? Perhaps not. Will they have ample information to get a clear picture of society from this era, and clear timelines of events, etc.? I would say yes, better than any other time so far.
I think people conflate "a lot of information won't survive in 500 years" with "we're going to lose everything."
I have literally thousands of pictures on my phone / in cloud storage. Odds are none of them will survive 500 years. That's OK, from a historical perspective -- 95% of them are cat pictures or memes anyway. 5% might document something interesting if it was all a historian had to puzzle together a picture of what life was like in the 2020s.
But it won't be, because we're literally producing trillions of digital artifacts. If even 1% (or probably even .1% or .01%) of those survive they'll have a richer visual representation of the 2020s than we have of other times in history.
(Whether we'll have any historians or humans in 500 years time, that's the real question.)
I'm not saying that we are not generating print information. I'm saying that we have a very low signal to noise ratio to the point that even if we do have a lot of information the chances that the 'good stuff' will be preserved are getting smaller by the day to the point that it will be essentially drowned out by junk unless we take special measures in the present.
Historians will have plenty of information to sift through from this era in 500 years. Will they have a complete collection of ACM Journals? Perhaps not. Will they have ample information to get a clear picture of society from this era, and clear timelines of events, etc.? I would say yes, better than any other time so far.
I think people conflate "a lot of information won't survive in 500 years" with "we're going to lose everything."
I have literally thousands of pictures on my phone / in cloud storage. Odds are none of them will survive 500 years. That's OK, from a historical perspective -- 95% of them are cat pictures or memes anyway. 5% might document something interesting if it was all a historian had to puzzle together a picture of what life was like in the 2020s.
But it won't be, because we're literally producing trillions of digital artifacts. If even 1% (or probably even .1% or .01%) of those survive they'll have a richer visual representation of the 2020s than we have of other times in history.
(Whether we'll have any historians or humans in 500 years time, that's the real question.)