In a thousand years, will historians regard today as the digital dark ages?
Considering the proliferation of AI-generated slop, as well as the lines between satire and reality being blurred, I wonder if future historians will have a harder time understanding what was really going on.
26 replies
My oh my. Check out Mr. Optimist over here thinking that they'll be time to be "historians" in between scavenging for scraps and battling the nuclear mutants for the last bottle of fresh water at the bombed out Tesco.
200 years? lmao, look everyone, this guy thinks our planet will support human life for another 200 years. At best another 80.
I mean, not to be captain optimist here, but human extinction is a bit far. Humans are extremely adaptable, even if they have to carve out a niche in the worst case hellscape they will survive.
Might not exactly be comfortable.
You speak the tru tru
The oil runs out in another 30 or 40; things are going to fall apart pretty quickly after that, when we won't be able to get enough food in to maintain cities.
If we're stupid to the point of fault. Even market pressure would force diversification of clean energy
The earth will be too hot to live on in less than 50 years, so yeah... Mr. Optimist indeed.
I was scanning, and thought you said we'd be battling nuclear mutants for the last bottle of Tabasco.
I don't know which version is more probable.
A “dark age” is really just one where records didn’t survive, not that it was particularly bad. This usually follows a breakdown of power structures but the real loss is that we can’t know what happened.
I’m worried that transitioning so much to fragile digital technology could result in massive amounts of knowledge and culture being inaccessible, like that guy’s hard drive full of Bitcoin.
And it’s not just all of society that will be lost, but family history as well. Photographs and letters survive a long, long time. But without strict preservation and keeping old formats alive my grandkids won’t be able to flip through old photos of my family like I can with an old photo album.
Well, with the amount they are attempting to rewrite, if Archive.org goes down, the dark ages shall begin.
We could lose 99.9% of digital records and what's left would still be far more than the amount of surviving records from any other point in history.
Some kind of dark ages - yes.
I suspect it will be considered the Lunatic Age or the Misinformation Age or the Willfully Ignorant Age or something like that, since its most distinctive characteristic, in retrospect, is likely to be the oddity that the creation of the most efficient and comprehensive information-sharing system the world has yet seen led pretty much directly to a worldwide epidemic of ignorance, stupidity, irrationality, and insanity.
I've seen "post factual" thrown around the most
See also: Post-Truth (Wikipedia). I'm depressed that articles like these even exist...
Makes it easier for someone to convince you that they know what's best for you.
In a thousand years, they'd probably lump together 1950 through 2150
Like two highlights. Going to the moon. And the environment.
I think in a thousand years there won't be any historians to think about it.
... nor much of anything else on Earth, for that matter.
If the dark ages were so called due to the shortage of sources, ours will be called the glare-blind age in contrast.
Bold of you to assume humans will still exist
You should peep this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment?wprov=sfti1#
I peeped the horror. It wasn't funny.
Yeah this is exactly what they want. No Voice, Free Exit sounds a lot like no representation and slavery to me.
Once the Internet goes down there's going to be a big dark information hole for sure.
Depends if you mean dark ages by not a lot of information that survives or economic stagnation.
First one idk but we are fully in an economic stagnation period due to late stage capitalism impeding innovation.
So historians might think that not much happened as in not much that is worth remembering happened.