> It is a fact of life that everything, if it isn't destroyed, unceremoniously self-destructs.

True. The Parthenon, the work of classical authors and philosophers. Michelangelo’s David. The work of musicians, artists, architects and authors from bygone eras. They all fade and disappear without the tireless effort of conservationists and historians everywhere.

And thank goodness for their work. Its an indictment of our modern technology landscape how much tomorrow’s historians will be missing. Perfect digital copies are trivially easy to make, but that doesn’t seem to help. Is it possible to run old iOS apps? Play old Xbox or PlayStation games after Microsoft and Sony shut down their old online services? Install and run old copies of adobe products? See what GMail looked like when it launched? Or play earlier versions of multiplayer games like WoW or EverQuest? No. In a few years it will all be gone, rendered inoperable, “upgraded” or purged.

The work of pirates, software crackers and emulators has kept some of what we had in the 90s alive. But so much software we have today has been intentionally artificially made to be ephemeral. Chess has survived for thousands of years. How long will DoTA, Diablo3 or Hearthstone be playable? These games will be lucky to survive a generation.

What an inhumane way to treat a creator’s life’s work. What callous disregard we hold for the curiosity of tomorrow.