How Can We Bear to Throw Anything Away?

Summary by Krater

An essay on the difficulty of preserving video games, digital records, and physical media, exploring the tension between archiving everything and the inevitability of loss.

From the video

Answers: Why is video game and digital media preservation so difficult?

• video game preservation
• the internet archive
• wikipedia
• encyclopedias
• marion stokes
• art spiegelman
• maus
• data hoarding

What it concludes

• 87% of classic video games are essentially unavailable.
• Classic games are defined as games through 2009.
• In 350 years, the number of bits produced will exceed the number of all atoms on Earth.
• In 500 years, digital content will account for more than half of the Earth's mass.
• Wikipedia's text-only download of current pages would run you less than 25 gigabytes of space.
• The internet does not exist in a democratized cloud, it exists as massive for-profit infrastructure.