The Eschaton As Data Loss

Given the fact that our lives are largely controlled by databases these days, whether they be administered by governments, banks or retailers; it stands to reason that the loss or degradation of this data could be quite catastrophic.

As Tom Simonite and Michael Le Page wrote recently:

"We are generating more information than ever before, and storing it in ever more transient media. Much of what it is being lost is hardly essential - future generations will probably manage fine without all the family photos and videos you lost when your hard drive died - but some is. In 2008, for instance, it emerged that the US had "forgotten" how to make a secret ingredient of some nuclear warheads."

The article this comment comes from illustrates such a cataclysmic event and examines the ways in which various physical media will decay over the next few centuries, or decades in some cases...

What's interesting is the contextualisation of this scenario as an apocalypse theory... a literal end of the world experience; all the more alarming given the fact that we've only existed on databases as long as databases have existed, which is not very long at all!

Exponential acceleration of digital information storage and sharing technologies has meant that pre-digital media now seems at the least antiquated, and in many cases redundant, in today's society. Case in point: when was the last time you shared a cooking recipe with someone that didn't involve the web or email?

This in itself leaves us with a peculiar dilemma... if knowledge is power, and so much of our knowledge is now stored on hard drives, will the total loss of data mean the end of the human race as we know it?

Sure it wouldn't kill us immediately; but it might lead to a startling tipping point where we realise that all the digital support systems in which we house our collective consciousness are suddenly unable to support us. Such a realisation would mean us having to re-learn lost methods of communication... quickly.

This may also amount to a kind of creeping generative amnesia... where our memories and experiences disappear soon after we've committed them to the ether, leaving us to repeat age old mistakes and share not-so-new learning in a series of looped 'Eureka' moments. A human race eternally doomed to intellectual Groundhog Day.

This then is the end of the world as forgotten knowledge, the Eschaton as data loss... perhaps not so scary for the average individual but potentially disastrous for the species as a whole.

There may of course be alternatives to hard data storage in the future. But, until then, we'd better get used to continually re-housing our data before entropy has its way.