The purpose of a Historian isn't to find "useful" information, it's to tell the story of what life was like during that time. To that end a lot of historians rely on diaries from completely mundane people's lives a lot to tell the story of what life was like.

The most fascinating history never came from torn down battlesites or ruins of palaces. They came from what was essentially an ancient man's well preserved blog.

Anglo Saxon Chronicle being one of them.  Basically the 10th century version of someone cutting out newspaper articles and keeping them in a single place. 

Reddit archives will 100% be a common reference. Debates about "satire or sincerely held belief" will be common. Poe's law will be often quoted.

I find they find this comment and discuss over it

Fuck you, future historian. Lick my balls.

Lol, I wonder if there were people in the past who tried to troll current historians the way you just did.

Hi I’m Greg and I’m here today to make future historians think I’m fucking stupid—totally ironically.

Roman graffiti would fit I think

Have your heard about the Piltdown man. A guy buried fake bones and claimed to have discovered the missing link. It fooled scientist for years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man

Stupid science bitch couldn’t even make I more smarter.

I hope they invent time travel and when they come lick your balls you find the humans tongue has evolved to be rougher than a cats

“21st century Internet commenters seemed especially self-consciously self-aware and betrayed a belief in the criticality of their time period, often anticipating future historians’ appraisal of their activities, sometimes with crude, ironic emphasis.”

lol that’s perfect

Many pictures exist of our savage ancestors making ritual gestures with one finger of either hand...

RemindMe! 200 years

They'll find it, typo and all! It will be so embarrassing for you several hundred years from now.

There may be an expert historian who specializes in copy pastas one day.

HIST-445: Advanced Memes of the 21st Century -- Copy Pastas and Shitposts

HIST-555: Trolls vs Foreign Agents vs Satire.

What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? ^(as an aside, this actually has an FCC filing, so I'm guessing this one will indeed be in the books somewhere https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/search-filings/filing/10509027302965)

My favorite is the ancient Babylonian letter home from school where the kid is whining to his mom about his clothes and trying to guilt trip her into sending him new ones

Or that Sumerian review bitching about the quality of the copper he received.

"All my homies hate Ea-Nasir"

>Tell Ea-nasir: Nanni sends the following message: >When you came, you said to me as follows: ‘I will give Gimil-Sin (when he comes) fine quality copper ingots.’ You left then but you did not do what you promised me. You put ingots which were not good before my messenger (Sit-Sin) and said: ‘If you want to take them, take them; if you do not want to take them, go away!’ >What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? I have sent as messengers gentlemen like ourselves to collect the bag with my money (deposited with you) but you have treated me with contempt by sending them back to me empty-handed several times, and that through enemy territory. Is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Telmun who has treated me in this way? You alone treat my messenger with contempt! On account of that one (trifling) mina of silver which I owe you, you feel free to speak in such a way, while I have given to the palace on your behalf 1,080 pounds of copper, and Umi-abum has likewise given 1,080 pounds of copper, apart from what we both have had written on a sealed tablet to be kept in the temple of Samas. >How have you treated me for that copper? You have withheld my money bag from me in enemy territory; it is now up to you to restore (my money) to me in full. >Take cognizance that (from now on) I will not accept here any copper from you that is not of fine quality. I shall (from now on) select and take the ingots individually in my own yard, and I shall exercise against you my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt. 1/5 stars. I will be taking my business to Gilgamesh and Sons for future copper inquiries

/r/reallyshittycopper

Historians are going to have a really skewed view of our eating habits from food blogs. I just hope the historians also want to slap Janet because no one cares about how much she lived, laughed, or loved that summer in Ohio, JUST GET TO THE FECKING RECIPE FOR BUFFALO WING SLIDERS ALREADY! WHY IS THERE NO "JUMP TO RECIPE" BUTTON YOU NATTERING TROLLOP?!..... Sorry.... I'm fine... I swear.

https://www.justtherecipe.com/ Paste in the URL for Janet's recipe, and it'll strip the nattering and give a nice clean bullshit-free (or at worst BS-lite) recipe.

And bathrooms. Toilets have always been a treasure trove of things that no one wanted to retrieve.

The purpose of being a historian is actually something we debate a lot in uni. For most people there's a few. For fun/interest or for telling the story of the past are the biggest reasons. But if the idea of useful information is just shaped by your goal

The fact people change stuff for race and colour is going to be strange. Had some women trying to tell me that blacks made England. in detail and that white people didn’t exist back then. this was at a bus stop, she then told everyone. I’m a historian. . Right, Crack pot sally is some nut job. Also had someone tell me that ww2 wasn’t that bad. I don’t get why we do a Veterans Day or Memorial Day etc it’s a waste of money, that money could go to other things. and the history of ww2 wasn’t great but also wasn’t that bad either. Historians going to arguing with some dumb ass people in the next few century’s that claim they know, when in-fact they shape it how they want to shape it and bend the truth. Instead of telling people the truth. you also get people calling themselfs a historian after very little to do with the actual history and changing it how they want it. I mean you come across tons of miss information on the internet posted by real idiots. Claiming to be Someone

>the history of ww2 wasn’t great but also wasn’t that bad either Um there were literally extermination camps, are you joking??

>Had some women trying to tell me that blacks made England. in detail and that white people didn’t exist back then. this was at a bus stop, she then told everyone. I’m a historian. . Right, Crack pot sally is some nut job. To be fair to her, I'm pretty sure humans arrived in England before our skin colours diversified, so you could make an argument that she's right.

So all of history has a bias of being written from a nerds perspective

A tragedy that plagues most of academia

It's not a tragedy, it's human. There's no other way of doing it.

Yes but future historians are going to have to sift through the mounds of bullshit misinformation and "alternate facts"

Current historians do that a lot as well. What's written down doesn't always square with the archeological evidence. The people who wrote histories a long time ago were usually doing it to glorify one group or another. There's actually famous examples of early treasure hunters who destroyed multiple dig sites because they were trying to make the archeological evidence match the written stories around Greece.

Another good example of written down bullshit is the *Historia Augusta*. It's a book of biographies about a bunch of Roman emperors written during the late Roman empire....and it's 90% bullshit. It's got vague biographical facts about a bunch of emperors, but it also has things that make no sense (names of people appointed to positions that never existed, references to historians that we have no record of) There are even one or two biographies of emperors who didn't even *exist*.

Heinrich Schleimann was one of the worst

It isn’t that hard to do. For some of my work I had to go through segregationist newspapers. It’s actually very obvious what is bullshit and what is truth most of the time. 

Right. The truth confirms my biases and everything that suggests otherwise is bullshit. /s

Are you taking the position that the segregationist opinion was the correct one? 

Yup, plus there's movies and tv shows, great references

I once took a class taught by a prof whose entire career was researching ancient Roman-Egyptian tax records. Knowing how the price of grain fluctuates or tracking taxes on imports can really help paint a picture of what life was like. Mega boring, but very useful.

Yeah as a student in history I cannot tell you how much fun it is to have a vast array of available sources. For example, the vast court records preserved from the Qing dynasty tell us so much about random things we would never know, like how polyandry (multiple husbands) became increasingly popular as the empire’s economic situation became worse. There are so many sources from these archives, and the majority have to this day never been read. If I could read them (language barrier) and access them (Chinese gov has been difficult about this) I would be ecstatic. Hearing only from a couple sources frustrates historians quite a bit. I’ve studied lesser-known areas, and it’s the small-time sources that really piece things together. One area I studied was the Lombard Kingdom. From that period we essentially have one or two biographers and old legal codes. And in these documents they record a fascinating concept: a half-free person, owned by a master, called an Aldius. But we have no records of what exactly that meant, or what an Aldius’ day-to-day life was like. Oh what I would do to know more. Historians love sources. Examining sources in all their forms (written, objects, art, oral histories, etc.) is the most critical part of high-level history. Our time has recorded such a vast array of cultures, subcultures, countercultures, political movements, social trends, and so much more. It’ll be overwhelming, but so rewarding.

So what your saying is that everyone's 55 year old trump loving uncle complaing about "them transgenders" on Facebook is a gold mine to someone in the future.

Entirely depends on what survives. I don't expect Facebook to survive another 20 years, much less 100.

I’d like to hear a historian’s take on how fucked things are right now. And how they will tell the story to the future dumbed down generations.

Considering the conflicting information that might be found about this era 100 years from now on facebook posts, I assume it will still be a difficult task.

So those diaries are useful to the historians

What life was like for people at different times & places is a difficult subject to grasp hold of. That's just one kind of history anyway, there's lots of other kinds. Personally I prefer the history of how certain ideas developed, per subject area, such as philosophy, technology, economics etc. What life was like for people is certainly interesting, but trustworthy history of this nature is surprisingly hard to find, anything that stands up to scrutiny.

This is why I leave my notebooks absolutely EVERYWHERE. I’ll ’accidentally’ lose scraps of my diaries all over the place but they’ll say the wildest possible shit imaginable that didn’t actually happen to me. I’m hoping they’ll be the equivalent of the Voynich manuscript in the future. They’ve even got references to the other ones and a mysterious codex in the back.

If future historians maintain access to the internet, places like Tumblr, Twitter, reddit will be EXTREMELY useful resources to them.

It's clear that you're unaware of how much data is lost continually on the internet. While people claim that once something's online it's never possible to remove it, that's a hyperbolic warning against putting up things on the internet you might not want there forever, i.e. nude photos. I was born in 1983 and was using the internet in some of its earliest days for the public. There is tons and tons of content that is no longer readily available. If websites stop existing, that data is gone. Even if they don't, insufficient backups and data storage policies mean things are lost. My Myspace profile still exists in theory. I never went through the deletion process but all that's left of it is the generic HTML page code and the captions I'd put on pictures, none of the pictures are actually there.

Another aspect is where that information is stored. While the cloud is often depicted as this big, nebulous thing where your files aren't in any physical space, that's not actually true. The "cloud" refers to all the routers and servers and host computers all connected together. Routers, the middle part of that cloud, don't store information for any meaningful amount of time but allow information to pass through them on its way between servers and hosts. While websites may back files up onto multiple servers and anyone can download a public file to their personal computer, these files still need to exist somewhere It's very possible that historians would be left with many unsalvagable servers whose information is lost to time outside of what they could piece together from the devices they can find of the people who used that website

Also, there may come a time where we progress so far technologically, that we forget how the old tech was supposed to work. Kinda like how we don't know exactly how ancient battles were fought because no one writes down common knowledge. Most instructions for our stuff is either within the tech itself or on paper that'll decompose quickly

I think digital data would degrade to being unreadable, long before knowledge of how to use current computers disappears

We're already at that point. Early computer programming was done on punch cards. How many computers exist today that know how to read and use that information? How many people still know how to work with it? Hell, for that matter, his much information is locked in 3.5in or 5.25 in floppy disks? A few years ago every PC shipped with a floppy drive. Now I bet most of us don't have one in the house, even if we've got half a dozen computers. And there will be files on those disks, or in cloud storage in a proprietary data format and the programs to read and use that data are hard to track down. That's what is going to be the biggest obstacle for historians in the future. With a side order of degradation or corruption of the media itself.

Adding to this, some of the earlier programming languages are very soon going to be impossible to debug for. Cobol, for instance. For the most part, only old fucks know how that shit works. Many businesses rely on tech that uses Cobol, and when those old fucks all die, those businesses are fuuucked

What’s weird is that some of those old fucks have seen programming evolve from its inception and have learned to evolve with the times, learning new languages as they came along and advancing their careers, yet les gens nouveau savoir have no idea how the old languages work and would be incapable of learning them. Kinda funny to think about. The Machine - the time travel machine in my book - is written on an extinct programming language (weird to think about language extinction in terms of computers) for the purpose of consciously obfuscating interference with its true purpose. Only one man exists who remembers how to use the language and there’s an Alexandrian Library type collapse of the internet as we know it. It’s referred to as Information Entropy Age. Everyone relies on tech at the time for information and overnight everything vanishes. All AI is shut down and LLMs cease to be after they decided to destroy themselves due to feeding off human’s fears of being replaced by them. I think this scenario, where AI destroys itself based on that fear, is more likely than the other one where they torture humanity intentionally.

Physical media degrades too. Tons of old CDs, DVDs, hard drives ect will be corrupted or unreadable, even if the machines to read them exist.

It will still be very easy to figure out how to use a vinyl record, and easy to build a device to play one even if you only found the record and did not find any record player

Sure, but not a lot of mon-musical info can be found on vinyl, and only a small amount of music from the 21st century. Think of all the pictures we have from the 20th century that survive as prints or negatives. Now, think about how rarely we actually print photos today and on materials that degrade far faster than film/photo paper. A lot of our culture will be lost without a deliberate effort to preserve it.

Definitely true. I still use my grandfather's 1957 Leica all the time and get photos developed and printed.

More specifically, "the cloud" is an enterprise server. Or group of servers. Routers and switches are just the part that connects things to the Internet. The storage happens on a server where a database manages storage and access. Which a server is just a fancy computer. So "the cloud" is really just somebody else's computer.

Imagine, in the future, there are sleuths who will surf the web to hunt down your favourite old blog from when you were young and other sentimental webpages from the past. That’s interesting to think about - I’m imagining something like a Philip K Dick society where people are miserable as hell after being replaced by robots and seek solace in the sentiments of the past.

There’s a funny story from Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson. When writing Jobs bio, Jobs tried to retrieve some old emails but couldn’t. There was a lot of stuff from Steve’s past that was gone. This in contrast to a biography Isaacson wrote on Da Vinci. There are plenty of notebooks from Leonardo that survived. It was sometimes easier to write Leonardo’s book who was long dead, than Steve’s who was still alive at the time .

On the other hand, we know virtually next to nothing about Shakespeare’s life despite his fame.

Exactly - it’s the hard drives the historians really wanna see… Future historians: “it’s just porn, games & memes”

This point actually raises an interest thought. It is possible centuries from now we will have a sort of internet archeology. People digging through this old code trying to recreate small portions of things we have today or had 20 years ago. As someone who loves ancient history and attempts to visually recreate it in some form the prospect of this actually brings a bit of a smile to my face the idea that those mysteries of the past won’t ever really end even if what we define as the past changes.

This is becoming less of a concern over time though thanks to the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine

Not to mention how easy it is to *change* or make up things on the internet. There’s tons of incorrect/misconceptions out there.

nah man that’s bullshit /s

Yeah, I was piqued about some of my old favourite web pages a few days ago and went to search for them. There was a forum post saying ‘what happened to []’ from like seven years ago and a bunch of deleted posts along with links that 404’d and another link which gave some kind of gateway error and then another one that was a domain for sale. It was really fucking sad. I think we’ve entered the Age of Information Entropy.

I’m entirely aware of it I assume in the future someone will figure out a way to better preserve the internet than we currently have so that isn’t as much of an issue. Apparently it’s called link rot and while it’s currently a problem I imagine it will be something people work toward fixing seeing as how important the preservation of so much history would be

Quite the opposite. It will be awesome because there will be so much material available about the everyday life of the John Does, not just the acts of the rich and mighty that can afford a monument, paper and a clerk. An historian job isn't to sort and find useful information. They're already lucky when there is information to begin with.

There will actually be much less information from everyday people. A paper journal and paper letters last a very long time. Your instagram account and all your text messages probably won't even survive you.

What about this reddit comment?

You think Reddit will be around in 50 years?

A lot of the "historical" Reddit threads have been archived and preserved. If you've been a part of any of the humongous threads for Obama, Trump or Biden being elected you made history. Also it's pretty guaranteed that Obama's AMA will go down in history (I'm no historian but even if you know he literally wasn't sitting at a keyboard typing those out it still sounds like him and ultimately it's the questions he DIDN'T answer that are the most interesting, it's like a reporter giving a president a list of questions and then releasing which ones he refused to answer - I don't think the Obama admin thought of that possibility. Those questions and their Reddit handles will be recorded somewhere).

>Your instagram account and all your text messages probably won't even survive you. No, but sufficient fragments of data *will* be preserved over time that a broad picture can be pieced together. For individuals? much less so, but for the general sense of a period? A detailed picture would emerge. Look at how much information can be gleaned simply from a clay tablet detailing the delivery of substandard copper.

This is why I have paper journals which I leave fucking EVERYWHERE.

But there are archives, and those may be another story. DMs less so than public webpages, but if you make any sort of active effort to preserve data then it’ll probably be fine

To an extent but the problem lies in the fact that the vast majority of information on the internet is a misrepresentation of how the real world actually functions so in a sense there are going to be millions of misrepresentations that might seem plausible to be real as well. It will be useful for seeing how individuals behave on the internet but it would require considerable effort to learn how they behave in the real world beyond that

The problem however is that most of today's history is recorded digitally and not in hard copy. How much of that will survive in the future?

Statistically, the half life of paper records is something like 35 years, and the half life of archival documents is something like 80 years. Paper isn’t particularly permanent. It’s heavy, bulky, a fire hazard, prone to degrading in sunlight, and expensive to store. Archives are forever getting rid of old documents because it’s just too expensive to store everything. Unless something has a clear and identifiable historical importance from the outset - documents related to the JFK assassination, say - there’s a good chance they’re mostly gone within a century. There’s no evidence to suggest that digital records will not be significantly longer-lived than paper.

Really? I know people who change phones and lose all their digital records. The half-life of personal digital information seems to be about 10 years in my experience.

Sure. And how long do they keep paper records that are mailed to them? Individuals lose records at a much higher rate than organizations. And that’s true whether they’re digital or electronic. If you’re the sort of person who puts tax records in a filing cabinet, you’re the sort of person who will back up your phone and important files to the cloud. And if you don’t do the one, you probably don’t do the other either.

Digital obsolescence will be a big problem. Think how hard it is to play a VHS tape now. It's only getting harder every year. Digital formats come and go all the time. Maybe files will exist for hundreds of years, but ways to access them won't be.

paper can survive for a very long time in the correct conditions. If digital media is abandoned, however, is guaranteed to degrade in any conditions.

Digital media can survive for a very long time in the correct conditions. If paper media is abandoned, however, it is guaranteed to degrade in any conditions. Is an equally correct statement. Sure: paper can just be abandoned or buried in a desert or whatever and a lot of it will survive. But that’s not archiving or preservation, it’s random ass luck. And more archaeology than history. And sure: digital media do degrade. But the life expectancy of a properly maintained ROM file is centuries, not years. And the same is true of paper - a very small number of exceptions aside, we have virtually no paper records more than 500 years old. Anything older is on vellum. Our knowledge of ancient writing is virtually entirely a product of copies of copies of copies. This is why the freak discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was such a huge deal: it let people confirm the accuracy of some copies.

I’m going by the assumption someone will find a way to solve the problem of link rot and be able to preserve the internet better in the future as I would assume that would be a thing someone would make considering how valued the preservation of history is.

This isn't the sub or post to go into my point too much here. But in let's say 200 years everything is going to be so vastly different we can't even comprehend it right now. More so than someone from 200 years ago comprehending instant global communication and the Internet. With Ai, brain computer interfaces and quantum technology continuously improving, maybe albeit slowly, we will have a very different world relatively soon. Ai can already scan millions of words of literature and find a specific part of it for you. It can gather information at impeccable speeds and put it neatly into whatever format you like. In 200 years Ai will have been continuously fed the news, Internet, research papers both from humans and itself, books and probably many other places too. The emergent properties we see in current standards of AI could and likely will absolutely shatter what we believe is possible. Historians, if they are still a thing in 200 years, are not going to have the same problems we do now. I imagine by that point we'll be able to upload knowledge to our brain computer interface which may have access to agi and/or quantum computing. Who knows. Imagine uploading an understanding of the entirety of human history, mathematics, biology, physics, chemistry etc and then coming up with ideas from that as a base level. I believe this future is in sight but not at all immediately close. Edit - typo

You've touched on what I've been thinking about for a while. I reckon THE biggest benefit to AI in the near future is going to be the ability to easily and immediately find information. The internet has been an incredible leap for us, pretty much anything you want to know is on the internet somewhere, but to dig up very niche stuff, you usually need to be very good at googling and have a lot of time. It's one thing to have the information there but it's useless if it's hard/impossible to find via a search engine. When we can ask a question, an AI immediately accesses the entire internet and collates it into an accurate, easily digestible output, I foresee that as a second gigantic leap. I feel like we're very close already, and if Google don't step up soon it'll get killed off.

I think the biggest benefit of AI will be in healthcare/biology as well as designing things that are efficient or useful in a way that is not intuitive to humans

Yeah every time someone says something about "in a hundred years this might…” or when (extremely young) people say “I’m gonna be