Digital obsolecense
Published on 29 January 2026 by Andrew Owen (5 minutes)
I touched on the subject of digital obsolecense in my recent article on the Hyperland documentary. This is usually taken to mean the loss of access to data because of changing technologies, but it really encompasses the potential loss of any digital content. A case could be made for including analog content such as audio, color film and video that has been preserved in digital format.
In the pre-digital world, the greatest single loss of knowledge may have been the fire at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt. It is difficult to substantiate because there are no physical remains of a library and accounts differ. But in his History of Rome, Livy wrote that 40,000 scrolls were destroyed in a fire started by Julius Caesar. Perhaps we should rename the seventh month after someone more deserving.
We have a fairly good idea of what we’re missing because the texts are mentioned in other texts. These include:
The future historians of the digital age have an unenviable task on their hands. Their colleagues cataloging the pre-digital age will have access to letters, photographs, postcards, newspapers and landfill. But they will have an unfathomable amount of data to deal with, and yet it will represent a mere fraction of everything that existed. The vast majority of texts, emails, social media posts, photographs and videos will be gone. Digital footprints will be as rare as fossils.
Take Hyperland. Despite being made by the BBC, the documentary is not available on iPlayer. You can view it at the Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library, because someone digitized a VHS recording and uploaded it. The problem with the archive is that it’s not exempt from copyright law. The BBC may be the public service broadcaster that has permanently destroyed the most hours of television by wiping video tapes for reuse. It is less culpable over the Domesday Project. The aim was to create a new Domesday Book. The 1086 version can be viewed in full at the National Archive. The 1986 version cannot.
What got me thinking about digital obsolescene again is that Electronic Arts is shutting down the servers for mobile sim-racing game Real Racing 3 on March 19. It effectively killed off the company behind the franchise in 2023. Online games go dark all the time. The last time I noticed was when Battlestar Galactica Online went dark in 2019. Even games that persist, don’t necessarily do so in their original form. Netflix’s Asphalt Xtreme is significantly different from the original version. The only example I can think of where you can play an earlier iteration of a game is Old School RuneScape, but that effectively killed RuneScape Classic.
EA switched off in-app purchases and gave players 1,000 in-game credits to spend between now and the shutdown. I spent mine on a Jaguar C-X75 and put some vinyls on it to match the color of the one Callum recently made road legal. But as I write this, the game is crashing on boot. I’m assuming it’s some kind of server glitch. How urgent will it be to fix it for a game that’s going away? But here’s the real rub. I never spent any real money on the game (so in a way it’s my fault it’s going away). But those who did might have thought they owned the things they bought. Of course they were just renting them. At least in the age of YouTube, there will be video evidence of games that can no-longer be played.
It’s not just online games though. Digitial content has long replaced physical boxes for PC games. Consoles are following suit. But when the platform goes away, there’s no guarantee that the successor will honor your purchases. What’s frustrating is that we have the technology to enable a purchase to be uniquely identified and traded: block-chain. But it’s not in the interest of a company to use it for this purpose when it can sell you the same game over and over again.
One exception to this rule is GOG (Good Old Games). They sell digital copies of classic and modern games without digital rights management (DRM). After you buy the game, you can install it wherever you want. There was a slight panic late last year when CD PROJEKT co-founder Michał Kiciński acquired 100% of GOG for about $25 million. Some people were concerned that GOG might go away and scrambled to download all their software. But the sale price suggests that it’s a viable business.
In most cases, the key to preservation is emulation (running software on a system other than the one it was designed for). Files in archaic formats can always be opened by the software that created them; if you have a system that software can run on (assuming bit-rot hasn’t set in). That’s the reason that I use a redundant RAID array for my local data. Although I’ve already moved most of it to the cloud (where I’m reliant on the backups of the service provider).
The final thing to consider is what happens to your digital footprint when you’re gone. You can only pass on things you own, so things you rented are gone unless you hand over the accounts while you’re still around. Social media platforms commonly offer a choice of memorialization or deletion. Cloud services hold on to data until someone with legal access shows up to request deletion or transfer. Email providers may require a death certificate. It’s important to make a will, but increasingly it’s also important to make a digital will.
But if you’ll excuse me, I somehow have to rustle up a couple of hundred in-game currency to max out my C-X75 before the game goes away forever.