Digital dark age

The digital dark age is the prospective future condition in which the cultural, scientific, and personal records of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries become unreadable or lost — not because they were destroyed in a single catastrophe, but because they were stored in formats that decayed faster than the institutions that managed them. Unlike manuscript losses, which leave physical traces, digital loss is silent: the medium becomes unreadable, the software that interpreted it is abandoned, and the institutional memory of how to reconstruct it dissipates. The Internet Archive and Web archiving initiatives are attempts to build institutional antibodies against this condition, but they are racing against the entropy of proprietary formats, platform consolidation, and the structural amnesia built into the web's architecture.