The new Dark Ages

Photo by Bernhard Dinger on Unsplash

I’m a history buff. There are a few different eras that I’m fascinated by, and the medieval period of Europe is certainly one of the biggies for me. As such, one of the first things you come to understand about the medieval period is that historians don’t use the term “Dark Ages” anymore because it’s terribly inaccurate.

Technology advanced, records were kept, and life kept trucking on. There were setbacks with the fall of the Roman Empire, but no different than they’d be when any other great power falls, especially for the people who live there.

Because of my love for history, though, I understand the value of the written word. Historians call text from the time they study “primary sources,” because it’s something written about a time when things are happening, more or less. They’re fascinating, and when a historian tries to make a claim that runs contrary to the primary sources, it’s a lot harder for them to defend that claim.

And if the Dark Ages were a time when there were few records left—which wasn’t the case at all, mind you—then we are living in that era right now.

Right now, you’re reading the written word. You’re using a phone, a tablet, or a computer, and the words appear on your screen. Probably throughout the day, you’ve checked your email, where you probably had a lot of spam, but also maybe the odd correspondence from a friend or family member. Most of you read the news on the computer and don’t bother to even think about buying a paper version.

All of that information is stored on a hard drive somewhere, at least for now. We can retrieve it simply by calling up our history of sent or received emails, or look up what I’ve written here previously by taking a gander at this Substack’s archive.

And all of this technology is pretty cool.

It’s also very fragile.

The first website I wrote for was called SamePageNation. They paid me a bit to aggregate news stories, and I would write a bit about the news, much like I do now here and at Bearing Arms. I met some wonderful people there, including my friend Kira Davis (who I assume you’ve all subscribed to, right?), but also others.

But the site wasn’t long-lived. In time, it shut down. The owners stopped paying for the hosting, and now it’s pretty much lost. You can find it on the Wayback Machine, but that’s it, and if anything happens to that site, then my early work is gone forever.

See, computer files aren’t eternal. We all have things we wrote that have been lost for all time. No one figured they were important, so they got tossed. Your email account may delete emails beyond a certain date, whether you want them deleted or not. Even if you don’t want to delete them, though, there’s a cap on just how much storage your account has, so sooner or later, someone is going to remove a bunch of them.

And that’s just on a personal level.

Past blogs I’ve had are largely gone or, at best, kept on someone else’s server for as long as they care about archiving the internet. Once they decide not to, or something happens to their storage, it’s all gone.

Ages from now, historians will look back and try to learn what the early 21st century was like, and have a problem. How much of that data will be retained? Sure, we might have every cat video sent via the White House’s email network, but what about the people who aren’t in government?

While it’s easy to think that this is a problem for them, we also need to think about how this impacts us today.

As it stands, this information is still largely available, but it doesn’t stop the left from trying to pretend things we all saw never really happened. They’re trying to gaslight the public into thinking that no, they never said all white people are racists, that cancel culture never happened, or that “woke” was never an actual thing.

They’re trying to memory hole everything right now, and that’s with the information still accessible.

Years down the road, with no hard copy that can survive various things hard drives cannot, it’ll be even easier. It’ll be simple for them to pretend none of their sins actually happened, which will just let them do it all again.

That’s especially true when someone savvy enough can access the data, even on archive sites, and change it to say whatever they want it to say. That’s a lot harder with a handwritten journal telling you when and where something happened and what it felt like when it did.

Like what saved Brett Kavanaugh’s bacon, and helped Lyndsey Fifield prove her allegations about Graham Platner were true.

The written word is important, and while technology has done amazing things to democratize journalism, commentary, and writing in general, the truth is that our reliance on it means we’re building an unsustainable framework for establishing fact from fiction.

You’re deluded if you think the left won’t capitalize on it if they get half a chance.

And none of this talks about the potential pitfalls of our own “empire” falling, taking the required infrastructure for this information with it to some degree or another. Not just American society, either, but the entire human civilization, which is interconnected like no other society before. Just one domino falling in one place could, hypothetically, doom every country to a sufficient degree that all of these ones and zeros could be lost forever.

So what do we do?

I won’t tell you to ignore email or buy hardcopy newspapers—those are, thankfully, stored in some physical medium by libraries—but maybe hardcopy books are good to have along with the ebooks. Write letters to people who matter and talk about the news of the time. Encourage them to keep them and to write back. Keep a journal where you talk about not just your life, but your response to whatever is happening in the world, too.

Document your life, and not just on social media. Document it for yourself, for your children, and encourage others to do the same.

History isn’t so much written by the victors as it’s written by those left to write about it.

I’m no Luddite. I respect technology and innovation. I just think we shouldn’t pretend that our status quo will always be as good as it is or better. Civilization doesn’t have a permanent upward trajectory, and even if it did, there are too many bad actors who need to be kept in check with documented facts.

At worst, you pick up a quirky pastime that doesn’t hurt anyone, despite what the ecotwits might think about paper usage. At best, you might be able to help stave off the barbarians at the gates.

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