Get ready for the ‘digital dark age’

I’m turning into a digital prepper.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

BRB, printing every issue of Embedded.—Kate

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I currently have 11,652 pictures on my phone. That number would be closer to a couple thousand, but I have a frantic need to take at least three versions of the same picture in quick succession so I can choose the best of them. For what? Who knows, because more often than not, I don’t do anything with them. And even though they just sit there, taking up space on my phone, I can’t bring myself to delete them, either.

If I harbor some anxiety about the impermanence of my memories, it’s not entirely unfounded. We’re entering a new digital dark age, a time when technology is progressing so rapidly that it’s making websites, social media posts, pictures, and other online records from just 10 years ago inaccessible. At the same time, efforts to preserve our digital history are being threatened—take the publishing industry’s years-long legal battle against the Internet Archive.