The reason we know about the past is because they left physical artifacts for us to see, read and study. We have written record on papyrus, stone walls and books. We have wall art, paintings and physical photographs. That’s true from the dawn of humanity until the proliferation of social media, the electronic economy, and of the printed word during the early 21st century.
Today, we generally don’t have any physical artifacts after social media appeared recently. Everything important since then like photos of families and special events and news are all electronic data; ones and zeroes. The scale of the data we have stored has speedily passed the petabyte and exabyte domain. According to the World Economic Forum, in 2020 there will be about 40 zettabytes (40 trillion gigabytes) of data worldwide.
Books and some newspapers still print, but who knows how long that will last. Someday cash and paper will evaporate from use completely. Our smartphones will be our masters. The so-called preppers will try to live independently of the system, but we all know that’s not going to happen for more than maybe two or three generations. Their descendants will either leave and rejoin society or they’ll just die out. But back to my point, the world will basically run on data alone. No more physical artifacts of historical value aside from kitchen and bathroom items, and furniture.
Perhaps some artists will still use physical paint but I predict most will turn to computers to create art. Music is now made on computers nowadays. Sure, we’ll still play Mozart or Bach on our violins but that’s 18th century stuff. No new music is or will be written on paper. It’s all data on disks.
All our banking records are electronic. All our stock exchanges are too. Our entire global economic infrastructure is electronic. Even small town banks connect to the Internet to the Fed. Or if it’s a branch of a major bank, is sure to be completely filled with computers. We are already seeing cash disappear. First with credit cards, then with NFC transactions with our phones and the advent of Bitcoin and others is making cash obsolete. It won’t be long before it disappears completely.
Governments are also becoming electronic data-based organizations. Larger governments may take longer to convert but smaller, richer states will easily be artifact free before the middle of the century. Amazon and Microsoft are already huge data storage contractors to ours and several other governments and militaries.
If something happens to erase all that data stored in our phones, computers and Facebook, Amazon and Google’s and our banks’ data centers, everything disappears. Backing everything up is becoming almost infeasible and uneconomical. So everything disappears. No history since the early 21st century. Scarce artifacts. Just a lot of blank hard drives in hundreds of huge data centers.
That “something” that erases all that data could be anything from a massive cyber attack by a state or non-state actor, a nuclear attack, or even a astronomical event with significant magnetic energy and global effect could turn all our hard drives into paperweights.
Feel free to elaborate on a possible data-wiping catastrophe or comment on my idea on the end of history as a result of a data-dependent world in the near future.
TL;DR: History relies of physical artifacts and physical written language. The 21st century is seeing the end of physical history because of the proliferation of electronic data in all facets of human life. A global magnetic catastrophe either natural or manmade can effectively erase our electronic history. Ideas?
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