You know all those posts about how humanity is the same it's always been. Like the boy who drew himself on his homework, the large building where someone carved the equivilant of "I was here" in the roof beams, the infamous clay tablet bemoaning the crappy copper, the graffiti in Pompeii. And all those posts about how historians in the future will be putting internet textposts and memes in textbooks as they try to decipher old human culture and humor. Well they got me thinking about how few of things survived to show that humanity has always been so inherently human, the small things we do that even through countless societal changes we can still find traces of (kids that like to doodle, the desire to leave traces of ourselves like carving our names or graffiti, wanting to explain the irritation at something lower quality than we were expecting. That it's a miracle how some of these things survived (the clay tablet literally only still exists because the dude kept a collection of his hate mail and then like this house burned down or something and was the perfect temperature to turn the tablets into essentially pottery) and if the internet disappears there will be such a huge part of our current society that if it disappears it'll be such a big loss to future historians in understanding us. Anyway my two main points are

1. There could have been ye olde tumblr sexyman/woman and plmm conests and we would have no clue

2. Historians might never know about the great bot war of the plmm polls

(Insert that one pic of the anon at a drive through window, sorry i just had an edible and my brain decided to do this)

- HM anon

(except imagine the drive thru worker has an expression of insightful wonder)

god damn youre right. like the idea of the through-thread of humanity also being like. arguing about who the best character in a series you enjoy is. what i wouldnt give to hear those conversations! to gain an inner look into someones mind from the fucking 1400s when they were talking about how a piece of literature touched them! fan culture has always existed and we are a part of it. makes me so scared to think about like. these large swathes of history being lost somehow.

i am so fascinated and grateful towards internet historians- people who collected seemingly anachronistic and small pieces and bits of information, screenshots, saved forum threads and stories about fandom culture. i watch deep dive videos on this topic all the time and think its incredible. absolutely love that idea that, now, i am involved in something that people will look back on. its fascinating. and its something that unites me not only with the people in my time, but the people in the future. i hope one day i can be like those trekkie fans that are in their 60s-70s and are still online talking about what it was like in their day. and i really hope that things like the plmm polls are preserved and remembered.

i would take an edible with you in solidarity but unfortunately i have class lmao