Google's Vint Cerf warns of 'digital Dark Age'

What I posted in the “Digitial Reichstag Fire” thread also applies here on how we are already getting rid of electronic records, because no one thinks to save them:

I was just want people to know that the Army, in the name of “electronic efficiency” disbanded the Adjutant General’s office that had ensured the Army’s records were maintained and safe guarded from 1776 though 1986, when it was disbanded because “computers were the wave of the future and we don’t need paper records any more.” They gave the records management job to the Army Signal Corps, which controlled the development of the Army’s computers, but the Signal guys and gals ignored that they now had to save the Army’s new electronic records.

Although the Army records system had problems during the Vietnam war and in the two decades afterward, it still did preserve and send to the National Archives its records. Do you remember the “Gulf War Syndrome” cases after Operation Desert Storm? the search for records to get information to verify the soldier’s claims and for the Army medics to investigate the causes were NOT there because nearly all of the Brigade and below records were left in theater (aka destroyed) because the Army would not pay to ship them back to the states. When OEF/OIF started, the system still wasn’t fixed and no one in the Army was preserving their records. That is what Mr. Sleeth exposed.

Read these documents that Sleeth got via FOIA:

http://www.propublica.org/documents/item/403775-nara-trip-report

http://www.propublica.org/documents/item/403798-joint-chiefs-white-paper#document/p5/a80951

http://www.propublica.org/documents/item/510007-stewart-paper#document/p2/a80776

I think the guy is right. So much correspondence will be lost. I have letters and documents that were from relatives in the 1800s. Almost nothing I’ve written will exist after I’m gone. I don’t print it and nobody would ever read through all the crap on my PC to find the good stuff. The hard drives will be wiped by whoever buys it at a garage sale and that will be that. Multiply that by millions of people. Or, consider complicated drawings done by a modern Tesla on some proprietary software. The hard drive is discovered a hundred years from now. How will they know who’s hard drive it was? How will they read it? How would they even know that it’s worthwhile?

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