The Archaeology of Tomorrow
I really miss Jackie Chan Adventures
*This article was originally published to my personal blog and Medium on Aug. 05, 2020*
Introduction
Imagine future archaeologists examining our civilization. Instead of pottery shards and stone tools, they’ll face the challenge of excavating our vast digital landscape. Our present exists in a state of digital paradox — simultaneously permanent and fleeting, where every digital interaction becomes part of an enormous, yet potentially inaccessible, historical record.
These future scholars won’t just dig through earth but will navigate obsolete hard drives, decrypt cloud storage, and piece together our digital lives. Unlike physical artifacts that gradually decay, digital artifacts face different threats. They can persist indefinitely through perfect copies, yet vanish instantly with a failed drive or forgotten password.
As we face significant political and social changes, with democracy under pressure and technology reshaping society, our digital footprints take on new importance. Every social media post, encrypted message, and digital transaction becomes potential evidence for future historians studying how we handled this crucial moment in human history.
The transformation of our archaeological record mirrors our society’s evolution — from stone tablets to silicon chips, from isolated communities to interconnected networks. This digital layer creates unprecedented evidence of how we lived, communicated, and governed ourselves. Future archaeologists won’t just study what we built; they’ll study what we posted, shared, and deleted.
As we build our digital civilization, we must consider what story our digital artifacts will tell about who we were and what we valued. Our responsibility extends beyond the present to those future generations who will interpret these digital remains to understand our time.
The New Pottery Shards
Just as archaeologists study ancient pottery to understand past civilizations, future scholars will examine our social media posts to comprehend our culture. Facebook’s “React” emotions, Twitter’s character limits, and Instagram’s filters aren’t just features — they’re cultural markers that shape how we communicate, much like how pottery styles reflected ancient trade routes and social customs. As Michel Foucault might have observed, these platforms don’t just archive our thoughts; they actively shape how we express them.
Our data centers and cloud storage systems serve as the digital equivalent of ancient burial grounds. Amazon Web Services alone stores tens of trillions of objects in its S3 service, creating what archeologist William Rathje would recognize as a form of “digital stratigraphy.” But unlike physical artifacts, these virtual remains face unique preservation challenges. The Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine,” storing over 400 billion web pages, stands as our civilization’s attempt at digital preservation, yet countless social media posts, messages, and digital artifacts are lost daily to what archivists call “bit rot.”
The evolution of file formats presents another layer of complexity. Consider how many can no longer access their WordPerfect files from the 1990s, or VHS home videos from the 1980s. Each format change creates what digital archaeologist Matthew Kirschenbaum calls “forensic materiality” — the physical traces of digital information that become increasingly difficult to interpret as technology advances. The metadata attached to our digital artifacts — timestamps, geolocation data, device information — provides crucial context for future historians, much like carbon dating does for traditional archaeology. Yet preserving this context presents significant challenges, as highlighted by the Library of Congress’s ongoing struggle to archive the nation’s Twitter feed, a project they abandoned in 2017 due to its overwhelming scale and complexity.
These digital artifacts, despite their apparent permanence, prove remarkably fragile. As Hannah Arendt noted about human artifacts, they give “worldly permanence and stability to the futility of mortal life.” In our digital age, this permanence becomes increasingly uncertain, requiring new approaches to preservation and interpretation.
Contemporary Relics
In the archaeological record of tomorrow, smartphones will likely serve as our era’s most revealing artifacts. These devices, evolving from the first iPhone in 2007 to today’s sophisticated computers-in-pocket, tell a story of rapid technological and social transformation. As George Orwell presciently noted in his essays about technology’s impact on society, these tools become extensions of ourselves, shaping not just how we communicate but how we think and behave. A single smartphone, with its apps, photos, and usage patterns, provides more intimate details about its owner’s life than any historical artifact could about an ancient individual.
The physical remains of our digital age create what environmentalists call the “technological stratigraphy” of the Anthropocene. E-waste dumps in places like Agbogbloshie, Ghana, form literal mountains of circuit boards, screens, and batteries — our civilization’s middens. The United Nations reports that humans generate over 50 million metric tons of e-waste annually, creating an unprecedented archaeological layer that will persist for centuries. This physical evidence of our digital life presents a stark contrast to the virtual nature of the data these devices once contained.
The rapid obsolescence of physical media tells another story. From vinyl to 8-tracks, from CDs to Blu-rays, each format’s lifespan grows shorter. The Library of Congress notes that the average lifespan of a CD is just 25 years, while cloud storage has rendered many physical formats obsolete. As William Gibson famously observed, “The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.” This uneven distribution becomes evident in the varying rates at which different societies abandon analog technologies, creating a complex technological landscape for future archaeologists to interpret.
These layers of technology — both physical and virtual — create what anthropologist Bruno Latour might call a “socio-technical network,” revealing not just what we built, but how we lived with what we built. From smart thermostats to connected refrigerators, our IoT devices paint a picture of a society increasingly dependent on invisible digital connections, while simultaneously generating very visible mountains of technological waste.
Tomorrow’s History
The question of digital survival extends beyond mere preservation of data — it’s about the legibility and interpretation of our digital footprints. Consider the cryptocurrency wallets that may become tomorrow’s buried treasure, containing fortunes in forgotten passwords and lost keys. The story of Stefan Thomas, who lost access to $220 million in Bitcoin due to a forgotten password, might one day be viewed similarly to tales of lost Spanish galleons. These digital assets, unlike physical gold or jewels, exist in a peculiar state of simultaneous presence and inaccessibility.
Virtual worlds present another fascinating challenge for future historians. From Second Life to Fortnite’s massive social events (like Travis Scott’s recent concert attended by 12.3 million players), these spaces host significant cultural moments that leave no physical trace. As Hannah Arendt might have observed, these digital public spaces create new forms of human interaction and political expression that challenge traditional concepts of community and presence. The challenge for future archaeologists won’t just be accessing these defunct digital worlds, but understanding their significance in shaping human behavior and society during our current era of democratic uncertainty. As we approach the 2020 election amid a global pandemic, these digital spaces have become our primary public squares.
The Archaeological Record of Democracy
In the digital ruins of our time, social media platforms stand as the agoras of our era, documenting both the vitality and vulnerability of democratic discourse. The ongoing protests for racial justice, largely organized through social media and documented in countless posts, tweets, and videos, provide future historians with an unprecedented view of democracy in action. Unlike the limited records of historical political upheavals, our digital age captures not just the events themselves but the entire social context surrounding them. As Michel Foucault might have noted, these platforms serve as both the medium and the surveillance mechanism, creating what he would call a “regime of truth” that shapes political reality.
The transformation of civic engagement into digital forms creates new types of political artifacts. Change.org petitions, GoFundMe campaigns for social causes, and viral hashtag movements like #BlackLivesMatter generate vast digital archives of political activity. Yet these records face unique challenges of preservation and interpretation. When future scholars examine the digital remains of our democracy, they’ll find a complex web of authentic grassroots movements intertwined with coordinated disinformation campaigns and bot networks. The Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, still reverberating through our political discourse, demonstrates how digital archaeology must grapple not just with what survived, but with questions of authenticity and manipulation.
Preservation and Loss
The data centers that power our digital world stand as the temples of our age — massive structures housing the collective memory of our civilization. Yet unlike the pyramids or Gothic cathedrals, these buildings may leave surprisingly little for future archaeologists to study. Companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft maintain millions of servers across the globe, but their contents are as ephemeral as they are vast. The surge in digital communication during the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates both the resilience and fragility of our digital infrastructure, as billions of human interactions shift almost entirely online.
The challenge of digital archiving extends beyond technical preservation. As Virginia Woolf might have observed in her reflections on memory and documentation, we face fundamental questions about what deserves to be preserved and who gets to decide. The Internet Archive’s efforts to preserve the web face constant legal challenges from copyright holders, while privacy regulations like the EU’s “right to be forgotten” deliberately erase digital history. Modern archivists must balance preservation against privacy, historical record against individual rights. Meanwhile, planned obsolescence continues to accelerate the cycle of digital decay — today’s cutting-edge technology becomes tomorrow’s unreadable format at an ever-increasing pace.
This tension between preservation and loss reflects broader societal conflicts. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted about democracy, the preservation of knowledge and culture requires conscious effort and institutional support. Yet our digital culture often prioritizes the immediate over the lasting, the viral over the permanent. The National Archives’ struggle to preserve presidential tweets and electronic communications reveals how our institutions haven’t fully adapted to the challenges of digital preservation. When future historians attempt to understand our era’s democratic crisis, will they have access to the digital breadcrumbs that could explain our society’s choices, or will they encounter only encrypted fragments and corrupted files?
Learning from Our Digital Future Past
Our digital artifacts tell a complex story of a civilization in transition, caught between unprecedented connectivity and growing isolation, between information abundance and truth scarcity. As we face the potential unraveling of democratic institutions, our digital legacy becomes increasingly crucial. Future archaeologists will find evidence of both our achievements and our failures — viral moments of unity alongside orchestrated campaigns of division, technological breakthroughs alongside systematic disinformation.
The responsibility we bear to future generations isn’t just about preserving data, but about ensuring its context and meaning survive. As George Orwell warned, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” In our digital age, this obliteration can happen not through deletion, but through overwhelming abundance and noise.
Looking Forward
To build a meaningful digital legacy, we must act with intention. This means:
Creating robust digital archives that prioritize context and authenticity over mere data preservation
Developing universal standards for digital preservation that can survive technological evolution
Supporting institutions dedicated to maintaining our digital heritage
Encouraging individual responsibility for personal digital legacies
As Amartya Sen argues in his work on development and freedom, the tools we create should enhance human capability rather than constrain it. Our digital infrastructure should serve not just present needs but future understanding. We must build systems that are not just technologically resilient but historically meaningful.
The future archaeologists who study our time will judge us not just by what we preserved, but by what we chose to value and protect. In an era where democracy faces unprecedented challenges, our digital artifacts may provide crucial lessons for future societies grappling with similar issues. By consciously shaping our digital legacy today, we can help ensure that tomorrow’s scholars find not just data, but wisdom in the digital layers we leave behind.
As we face potential political upheaval and social transformation, our digital footprints may become the most important evidence of how a society either preserved or lost its democratic principles. The archaeology of tomorrow begins with the choices we make today.