Maybe it’s even already happened and I’m simply not aware of it.

  • whileloop@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    In the time of Plato, only the most educated could read and write. So if you could do both, I think your odds of being remembered had almost as much to do with writing good quality as it did with being lucky enough for your writing to survive centuries.

    As for us…it will happen but only very rarely.

    • FelipeFelop@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      There are merchants records and other civil documents from 1,200 years before Plato. In fact the oldest known letter of complaint dates from 1,750BC.

      So I disagree.

            • FelipeFelop@feddit.uk
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              1 year ago

              I’m not sure how else to say it without repeating it.

              I disagree that only the most educated people could read and write

              I disagree that not many internet posts will be recorded for posterity

              • merde alors@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                but we know that too few people used to be literate. I couldn’t understand the need to disagree with this, i thought i misunderstood what you wrote.

                • FelipeFelop@feddit.uk
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                  1 year ago

                  It’s actually a bit of an ‘urban myth’ it did apply in eg Victorian Times but at other points in history there was widespread literacy.

                  What you do find at some times is that an elite wrote and spoke one language but everyone else wrote another. Which was a way of controlling access to information. This is one reason that the Bible was in Latin and there was subterfuge needed to get the first Bible in English. (The pages were smuggled into the country)

    • Thorny_Thicket@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Climate change is a threat to humanity but it’s not an existential threat. I don’t get why this kind of extremist thinking is so common here…

        • Thorny_Thicket@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          No credible scientist is claiming it’s going go wipe out entire humanity. The estimates for excess yearly deaths in 2050 - 2100 vary from some hundreds of thousands to few million.

          It’s bad but it’s not “we’re all going go die” -bad

  • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Most likely the only time this would happen is if someone is trying to make a point and they take a joke post as something serious.

  • TheTango@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I wish I could be alive when two archeologists attempt to decipher what “Two Girls One Cup” means.

    • platysalty@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      “In the light of extreme climate change at the turn of the millennium, some humans have resorted to extreme forms of recycling…”

  • DancingPickle@lemmy.worldM
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    1 year ago

    First, let’s consider that up until fairly recently in human society, writing has been the domain of the wealthy and not entirely accessible to everyone. The rich could write whatever they want or patronize those who could write what they wanted for them. The rarity - relative to the greatest developments of proliferation being chiefly the printing press and recently the internet - of written works, demanded that anything someone bothered to put into physical written form must have considerable innate value to someone. If they didn’t, nobody would have bothered with the effort or expense.

    I no longer have access to the reference for a citation and am having trouble digging it up, but I saw (probably on a blog about AI) some figures recently describing the amount of written “material” produced by humanity on a daily basis (or some other comically short time) in 2023 being comparable to the amount produced in the ~five thousand preceding years since the written word is thought to have been invented.

    With as much “writing” being produced, most of it being spam or low-effort shitposting, the signal to noise ratio is unbelievably high. Regardless of the profundity of the thought being born and described, the chance of having anything written today - randomly on the internet - recognized for its quality is infinitesimally small.

    I believe that there IS a fantastic amount of truly remarkable writing being done every day all over the internet. Nearly all of it will be retained on some form of media basically forever, even until the media is woefully obsolete / destroyed / the heat death of the universe. Most of it will never be set upon by human eyes again after this weekend.

    Today, like hundreds of years ago, what rises to the surface does so due to commercial pressures. If you are awesome and impress a publisher with deep pockets, your words could be preserved in a form that will be read in 2434. Of course, it will have to continue to be impressive long after most of the books selected by Oprah’s Book Club.

  • ThirdNerd@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I think people 500+ years from now will look back on us like we look back on people of the European Dark Ages.

  • lackadaisy@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I bet it’ll be

    “In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god’s blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence.”