Jeremy Hedley of Antipixel writes today about the problem of data preservation. I’ve been (very slowly) re-reading The Shadow of the Torturer, which has gotten me thinking about the state of the our world as it will be many years from now. I think we have a problem that’s burning from both ends: we’re both losing lots of data and accumulating lots more. Great works may well be lost to data corruption or fires, but just as many may be lost of the inaccesible vastness of Raiders of the Lost Ark-esque information stores. There are already too many books I’d like to read that I’d have to stop socializing to get through them. Today, when I want to read about a topic, I look it up in Google and maybe read the first three or five hits I see. I can see a future where that same search turns up hundreds. Obscurity by abundance.