Inspired by the post about the hieroglyphs the one dude hoped would last forever.
People always talk about future historians being confused at memes and old forums, but surely a lot of catastrophic events could just wipe out the internet wholesale, right? If something REALLY COOL like a giant meteor wiped out everybody, what if aliens came along and were deeply confused that our culture seems to end randomly in the mid 2010s, subsumed by an internet whose only remaining shreds are references in big scientific studies?
The history textbooks on our dumb asses would surely read "and the humans all talked into screens and used "hyper links" to share information and opinions. Very little is known about this obscure human ritual as no evidence can be found of its existence beyond scattered references in ancient texts contemporary to its existence."
Thinkin bout the impermanence of the internet rn
Future aliens will be piecing together what the internet was from surviving copies of Geocities for Dummies and stuff like that. They'll know how our computers worked by reading Linux manuals from the 90s, and if all else fails there was that big meme rock that 9gag had buried in the desert somewhere.