Something I’ve been thinking about lately is: How do we deal with archival of the written word in the digital age?

When someone publishes a physical book, a CD, or a Blu-ray, that content is out there forever so long as copies exist in the wild. When someone publishes a video to YouTube it only really exists so long as the channel author and/or YouTube wills it to be. Same problem for software and services, photos, web pages, and streaming audio. It’s very difficult to return years later after a video has been pulled by the creator to be able to find it again, although sporadic archives do appear to exist if you’re lucky.

In a world that relies more and more on ephemeral digital distribution and infrastructure, I worry greatly about how much information about today will actually be available to future historians looking back on our society centuries from now. For me, it was a hassle trying to locate a video from 2011 that was pulled from the DigitalRev TV YouTube channel: