Well, okay, you’re talking “end of the free and open Internet” which, yeah, would be a pretty big and terrible deal, and I really hope people and institutions that are able, are archiving such important things! (I should see how big that Wikipedia archive is for kicks lol). But yeah, we’d have much bigger problems.

We gotta support archive.org and our libraries for this reason! I would hate to be without them.

I personally wasn’t talking about digital “prepping” so much as I was talking about motivations for hoarding data of things we’re interested in. Our media becoming lost media because wealthy interests don’t give a crap or, worse, decided to censor it.

Not everyone is just hoarding Sailor Moon episodes; people have tons of books and manuals too just because it interests them. Lots of people preserve video game ROMs as well, which has thankfully kept those works from disappearing entirely.

Moving that information would become significantly more difficult without a free and open Internet, but that’s a different “threat model” worth its own conversation, I think.

For what you’re talking about. I bet you’d be interested in someone like Marion Stokes , for instance, who “data hoarded” tons of recordings of television news, and that archive actually proved useful to historians way later.

Thanks for your thoughtful comment and perspective. :)