marx was wrong. we are literally lost to time, and the next dark age.

 Some ideas on the drawing dark.

Over the years of human history, we see periods of time where information is stored in systems of raising complexity, but along with each rise comes a rise in precariousness. We have cave paintings, that took a long time, were low resolution images and held very limited data, and very limited portability. We see increases in the fidelity of images when we get to optery, then the great paintings then to film cameras and now to digital. The increase of information stored in each step is accompanied by a decrease in permanence and a proliferation of content. Now in our digital age we have high resolution images that not only hold more information than the human eye can discern, but also can hide geo-tags and timestamps. But they are stored on media that will not last. Your great grandchild will never see any of your selfies, as the hard drives, memory sticks and cloud storage will all degrade. While kodak images from the 70’s and 80’s will still remain, but those two will degrade long before the pigments in the mona-lisa do. 

We are diditising all our information, but we are simultaneously destroying bulky hard media. And the precariousness is more than you may think at first blush. I currently only intend to post these words online. Never to be printed by ink onto paper. Their only chance at long term survival being that the company that hosts the site continues to think its profitable to continue to host that page for me.  Even as they do, solar flares and the background radiation of the universe can flip the little ones and zeros at random making whatever system is trying to access them lose the pointer to the next letter in the series. Baring that i must rely on the company hosting it not experiencing any economic shocks, byouts by another company who would want to change or discontinue the service, and although Google and Facebook seem like interminable forces right now, there was a time when ask jeeves, yahoo, myspace, aol all felt the same, as did the immense reach of kodak and polaroid years before. Nothing lasts forever, “stange with eons even  microsoft will die”. 

And as our digital information is only selected to continue based on its current profitability, we are definitely living in a time that will be lost. The only question i have is will it be lost as irrelevant in a continuing digital economy, or if the age we live in, if our information becomes a dark age due the the collapse of that digital economy first. Either way, i see a time when a shock ether ecological, or economic, will have all the knowledge we are creating be lost. 

Its happened in history several time in the past. We don’t know the reason behind the collapse of the mesopotamia civilisation and the loss of information it accompanied. We have theories many competing ones but they all seem to suffer from the same lack of evidence to give us any reasonable certainty. 

So now that I’ve set the stage for our coming dark age, and how all our lives will be lost into it. let me give you one reason ive recently thought of that might make it seem a little less dire. 

Marx believed that the economic system would inevitably lead to workers understanding that all economic value is created by the labor of the working class and that the owning class provides nothing but to usurp that value living off the workers like a parasite. Writing in 1867, it may have seemed inevitable. But now that we are living in situations starting to resemble “late stage capitalism” as marx predicted, what we see is that owners are becoming able to continually make the labor of workers less important in their systems. And instead of worker class consciousness, we are seeing that workers are being forced to compete the ever shrinking tasks we are suited for. The pessimist in me is starting to think that the class war will be won by capital long before the workers are aware a war is even coming. We are moving towards a time where the owners with their wealth will be so rich and isolated that we will become the neo-peasant with no loards, only bosses, banks, and contracts to keep us enslaved. 

How will the coming dark age interplay with this, will it wipe out the information of a time where we once wanted to strive for individuals to be free, and sought higher ideals (Even as we have been wholly inadequate at having those ideals materialized for most)? Will it be a technologically advanced, but stagnating society? (stagnating due to the only innovations being implemented are ones that could promote next quarter profits, and stagnating due to us returning to our history where only the aristocrat class would have the time and resources to devote to innovation, while millions and millions of Einsteinin minds live entire lives without access to information or to a voice for their knowledge to be spread with.)

Or will the collapse be one of population contraction, accompanied by technological contractions, as the previous dark ages did. We wont have the alexandria library to worry about burning, as all human thought and advancement unfortunate enough to not be deemed worthy of printing on paper will vanish as if it never existed at all. 

For simplicity, lets use the highly unlikely, common zombie apocalypse trope… February of 2023 (14 months in the future as of time of writing) never arrives, as between now and then, the zombies come and kill off 99% of the world population. And then for whatever reason the zombie virus goes extinct. That would still leave 78 million people on the planet, but we would be far apart, wed be focused on trying to produce for our basic needs again. We wouldn't have the resources nor the time to repair the underwater cable giving us internet and phone connectivity between the continents. Its unlikely we’d be able to maintain a reliable power grid, and the power we would generate wouldn't be devoted to maintaining googles servers. 

Knowing that most people who were experts in anything would be gone, once we were able to produce enough food and shelter to allow for leisure time, what information could we find to help us recreate the mechanical advantages humanity held in the past? If your town still has a library, it's likely that their technical books are from the 1980’s. Any surviving university libraries or book stores may give us more current information, but how much of that requires previous knowledges that were assumed knowledge for entering students, or were to be taught buy the professors (whose notes are lost to the digital realm). All of this is to say that the digital lives we are creating, all cutting edge knowledge won’t be available for rediscovery by someone booting up an old laptop. (the laptops won't boot up as the information on the hard drive will have been degraded). As were about half way through (what I assume will be a 30 month pandemic), its interesting to think about how much of our electronic information couldn't survive only a few years of inattention. 

Anyways to my tiny thin glimmer of a silver lining. The last dark age was kicked off by a collapse of the power systems that were entranced before, and the ending of the dark age was again accompanied by the collapse of the entrenched power systems. So as I don't see the international proletariat rising up to grant liberty to the masses, my only real hope is that the coming dark will remove our current oppressors, and the next renaissance is kicked off by someone finding egalitarian writings. Either way I’ll probably be dead, and everything ive ever said of value will be lost never to be discovered or known (assuming something I’ll contribute will be valuable lol), and even the lives im able to have a positive effect on now, will be from a timeline never to be known.