Tito's Blog

We Are Atlantis

The amount of information produced by humanity has exploded in the past 15 years, due to exponentially growing population compounded - even more importantly - with a discontinuity in content per capita brought about by digital tools and the internet.

New technologies have lowered dramatically the barriers to entry to content production, expanding by an order of magnitude the number of people transitioning from consumers to producers of information. Such a disruption possibly had an even more substantial impact than Gutenberg’s invention of printing press in the fifteenth century.

However, this wealth of information has been distributed on ephemeral media, such as floppy disks, hard drives, digital camers, optical drives, whose standards are changing every few years and moving into obsolescence at a fast clip. Who’s going to be able to read content from a CD or DVD in say ten years? How about in a hundred or a thousand years? How many terabytes of text, pictures, videos documenting our age are going to be lost forever, trapped into obsolete memory devices?

Similarly, a recent Guardian article points out that internet websites ever changing content is continuously lost.

I doubt we would have known about Hammurabi’s code if it was stored on a hard drive. Our information-rich era ironically will not leave as many traces as the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians or Romans and might just fall into oblivion like a modern Atlantis.