I see a lot of comments amounting to saying that contemporary digital content isn't worth much, and its loss wouldn't be a big hardship. This isn't the only kind of digital content though. What I am worried about is older, pre-digital matter which is thrown out because digital copies now exist (often crappy scans of marked-up, faded pages, but that's another rant.) When the digital copies disappear, we will no longer have the durable pre-digital copies to revert to.
Indeed. Every time we scan a document and throw the original away, we're betting for the continued existence of current technological civilization. If it collapses, the thing we digitized and thrown away is the thing future generations will have lost from the cultural heritage. The Dark Ages may end up extending far beyond the beginning of information age.
