The term “Dark Age” is a controversial one in the field of history. Many have used the phrase pejoratively to imply that the Middle Ages in Europe were more barbaric and horrible than Classical Antiquity or the Renaissance between which they were sandwiched. Others argue there is no such thing as the “Dark Age,” and that it’s revisionist to use the term to describe this historical period.

Personally, I subscribe to the commonly held belief that the term “Dark Age” can be used to describe not a decline in quality of life, morals, or innovation, but rather a darkness of the archives resulting from a lack of consistent written sources. Whether or not the extent of this darkness in the European Middle Ages is overblown is well above my pay grade. In any case, the term can be useful when describing an era of lost information that makes a historian’s work all the more difficult.

Now, to reference some notable Wesleyan alums, I fear we’re in the midst of our own Little Dark Age. One of TikTok bans, privately owned information, and technological obsolescence.

TikTok, the short-form video app that is used by a third of Americans and over half of U.S. adults under 30, dominated a few news cycles and much of social media discourse in the lead-up to its possible ban on Jan. 19, 2025. As we now know, the ban lasted only a few hours before the app returned with a message to its American users.

“Thanks for your patience and support,” a pop-up upon opening TikTok read. “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!”

Ignoring the obvious Trump brown-nosing that TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew has undertaken to keep his app afloat, the momentary scare gave me a great deal of pause.

As I have previously written about in The Argus, I have a minor obsession with maintaining a robust digital archive of my life. Call it crazy, call it smart, call it whatever you want, but when the TikTok ban loomed, I had this horrible feeling in my gut.

Information in the digital age is largely privately-owned and fleeting. There are a few sources that keep it for public use—the Internet Archive in particular, which has come under scrutiny from copyright lawyers in recent times, is a fantastic resource—but the vast majority of the Internet is subdivided into private ownership. And if information is owned, it can be erased, distorted or controlled. Take, for example, TikTok. Our data may be our own on a technical level, sure, but functionally TikTok has total control over that information.

I even downloaded my TikTok data before the brief ban went into effect, only to find that much of it didn’t go back further than last July, and all of it was almost entirely interlaced with links back to other TikTok videos. So, for example, if it told me what videos I had liked, it would list the date that I liked something and a link to the TikTok. No information such as who had posted the video, when it was posted, what the caption read, etc. If TikTok went down, this info would be basically useless.

In the introduction to his book, “The Archived Web: Doing History in the Digital Age,” Professor Niels Brügger, Head of the Centre for Internet Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark, describes the way that Whitehouse.gov changes from president to president, with new information added, and old information lost, each time.

Brügger says there are three takeaways from this deletion and alteration of the government website: first, that in the last 30 years, the internet has become a central and inherent part of human life, and will be therefore invaluable to studies of our culture in the future; second, that the web is volatile and subject to alteration or deletion at an unprecedented scale when compared with traditional media; and third, that the web itself is not an archive, but rather must be archived by someone else (a person, institution, group, etc.).

Think of TikTok here. Obviously, had the ban gone into effect long-term, the app would’ve been available in many other countries, but imagine if that weren’t the case. Imagine if one day TikTok were to just delete or restrict their servers, ban all users, and give everyone an error message. This app that boasts over a billion users and has been a central forum of culture for the last five years would just be gone as if it never existed. Sure, there would be some compilations on YouTube, but what if the same happened to YouTube? Or to the Internet Archive? What good would the TikTok data I downloaded be if it linked to nowhere?

Or, if you want to zoom even farther out, imagine it’s the year 2500. The internet as we know it is long-dormant—something’s replaced it, or a solar event knocked it out, or some other evolution in technology made it obsolete. How would a historian know what was happening in our lifetimes? Historians up to now have relied on physical documents and artifacts to study the past. If almost all of the media we’re creating now is born-digital (created on, and intended for consumption on electronic devices), how will a historian in 500 years without the internet be able to study our lives?

This isn’t some hypothetical scary scenario, either. In his article “A new Digital Dark Age? Collaborative web tools, social media and long-term preservation,” Professor of Digital Heritage at the Glasgow School of Art Stuart Jeffrey argues we have already seen the first Digital Dark Age.

Data has been and continues to be corrupted by degrading DVDs and magnetic tape, hundreds of information storage technologies such as floppy disks or Jaz drives have become obsolete, software that allows us to access data is either owned and controlled by corporations or becomes inaccessible as technology improves, and inadequate metadata leaves us wondering where information that we have maintained actually came from.

All of this only threatens to worsen with time. Jeffrey notes that social media is uniquely hard to archive and, while his piece came out in 2012, before the massive dominance of social media we see today, his analysis remains applicable. When technology for the creation of media outpaces the means of its preservation, information is lost to time. 

This goes beyond cultural-historical artifacts such as social media, which is already infamous for having been carved up between billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. More and more news organizations and academic journals solely publish online now. Communications such as emails, texts, and voice memos are stored on servers that belong to Google, Apple, and Microsoft. Think of how many documents only exist on Google Drive, OneDrive, or iCloud.

If one day Google’s shares tank, the company goes bankrupt, and no one sees fit to buy their file storage, that information could just vanish in a moment. Or, someone pushing an update to Microsoft Office Suite could accidentally keystroke away thousands of files. Or maybe it becomes as simple as Apple deciding their historical data storage is too large, so they start purging iMessage logs.

I can’t predict the likelihood of these events happening, but I can say they’re far from impossible. And if they happen, there’s little to no recourse users have to get their data back.

I won’t lie—I live in fear of this information disappearing. In case it wasn’t apparent from the tone of this piece or the content of my previously mentioned article on my personal surveillance state, I love to know things and hate to forget them. What I hate even more is if everyone—even history—forgets. 

But forgetting is not guaranteed. The field of digital preservation grows every year, and will become especially vital as the new Trump administration might seek to revise history to fit its ideological retelling of the past. There are organizations—governmental and nongovernmental—dedicated to storing digital data and maintaining clear records of where it came from, who made it, and what it is. 

Still, I would feel remiss if I didn’t also recommend an individual course of action. In an age where more people are becoming aware of how fallible the institutions we rely on are, I cannot in good conscience tell you, “Don’t worry, someone else has got it handled.”

My advice is to save as much of your own data as possible. Even if it’s on a digital source, if it’s yours—not in the cloud, not on a school or company account, but in your files—you have a much better guarantee that this data will last. If you get a new computer, save as many of the old files as possible to the new hard drive (or to another drive; although be wary of the dangers of obsolescence there).

Importantly, if you’re like me and are facing graduation soon, download as much as you can from institutional accounts. The files from my four years in college that are stored between Wesleyan’s OneDrive, Google Drive, etc. are precious to me. I want to keep them as long as I possibly can.

My final, and perhaps most important, piece of advice is to document the world around you as you experience it on paper if you can (digitally if you’d really rather; see entire article above). Keep a diary. Make photo albums and scrapbooks. Draw and write and print your life. The stories of our time may fall to decay eventually, but they are precious nonetheless. So long as you don’t forget, you stave off being forgotten.

Sam Hilton is a member of the class of 2025 and can be reached at shilton@wesleyan.edu.