What we're doing right now is borderline insane. We're putting all of this information on the web, but almost each individual bit of information is dependent on either a company or a human being keeping it online. It's inevitable that companies change their minds, and humans die, so almost all of the information that is online right now will just disappear in the next 80 years.

And we essentially only have one single entity that tries to retain that information.

Books deserve a github repo with PDF web archives of referenced links, the same way that Wikipedia mirrors the content of cited links.

Storage cost has fallen exponentially for decades, https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-price-of-comput...

... and it would serve as a form of redundancy, imitating the fungible nature of physical media: In order to cite the latest, copied, manuscript (for example) you needed to own a physical copy. They existence of these has enabled survival of works that would otherwise have been lost, or even reconstruction through ecdotics.-

> And we essentially only have one single entity that tries to retain that information.

Will future ages find ours a dark age, a gap in their records, a void ...

... up until the point - if ever - where a sufficiently advanced solution for permanence is found and comes online?

Like the laser printer?

The cost of permanent, physical preservation is pennies. People just don't do it for most things. And it doesn't guarantee accessibility, which has hosting costs.

Sure. Whatever works.-

But I meant one that is systematically and systemically and widely used.-

I think this is a very likely future, yes.

Out of curiosity, may I ask what it was about?

I still appreciate it, but just imagine if it goes down due to a lawsuit. Now that Google no longer shows cached results, an entire historical record would be gone.

That was also the "end of an era" of sorts right there.-

> they don't encourage mirror sites to emerge,

Something over BitTorrent or blockchain would work well here, methinks. As a baseline substrate.-

Heck, existing paper-based libraries should probably each include a digital archiving department.

Maybe this is already happening or already exists, and is trivial to those studying library science or something. I can hope, anyway.

Local neighborhood libraries could have their own curated digital archive, as cache for fast local search, and archival backup for long-term resilience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Web_archiving_initiati...

But the web is large. And public sector or academic librarian teams tend to be small. The IA's the one that people have coalesced around.

Or somebody accidentally `rm -rf`'s an empty variable. Or The Big One hits San Fran. Or somebody in crisis breaks in with a crowbar, matchbook, and jug of gasoline.

They're a rather old-school shop. Own their own servers, all in one location I think. Bare metal admin stuff, and data's only mirrored across two disks per file IIRC. Keeps costs down. It's what makes the whole operation possible. But I also wonder sometimes.