A woman on TikTok is shedding light on the “digital dark age.”
She believes that people’s memories—videos, images, and written posts—will one day vanish, along with the social media platforms they were originally posted on.
TikTok user @daisybow_craft shared this theory in a stitched video, responding to a user who had an opposite take.
@daisybow_craft #stitch with @carlyincontro ♬ original sound – Daisy Bow Craft & Cyanotype
“The fact that we only have shi**y pictures of our older ancestors but once we are old and gone, they’ll be able to hypothetically watch hundreds of videos and pictures of us and get a [glimpse of] our personalities,” the text overlay read.
But @daisybow_craft disagrees.
In her video, which had accrued more than 1.3 million views by Monday, she says that our future ancestors won’t be able to look back on our videos and photos posted to social media. The reason, she explains, is that we’re living in a “digital dark age.”
“This means that we’re producing so much information, but [it’s] so unstable because it’s dependent on the device and on the cloud and on electricity,” she says.
To solidify her point, she posed a question in the text overlay to make viewers think: “How many of you can access old text messages on your very first phones?”
This led to her next point: “How are people gonna access my Instagram 100 years from now? Are they gonna go back and read all the comments? Are they gonna go and look at the pictures i posted? Will Instagram even exist?”
Another question posed by @daisybow_craft concerns what happens to a person’s iCloud storage once they die, and what becomes of their social media footprint. “Have we not thought about this yet?” she asks in her video. “It’s scary.”
The TikTok user’s poignant message reminded users of social media platforms that have already vanished, along with users’ data.
“Myspace wasn’t that long ago,” one user wrote. “Completely gone.” According to the company, an issue with data migration caused them to lose data that was added to the site before 2015.
“As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago, may no longer be available on or from MySpace,” they shared in a 2019 statement from the company. “We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Another example of an obsolete social network is Vine, the popular video-sharing app that shut down in 2017.
“Use vine as an example,” one user commented. “I can’t get my sister who passed away’s content and never will.”
Many viewers took @daisybow_craft’s video as a suggestion to revisit traditional methods of storing their data, through photographs, scrapbooks, CDs, and other analog forms of media.
“You’ve reminded me to print some photobooks!” a user commented.
“At minimum people need to be regularly backing up their photos on an external hard drive or something, don’t rely on the cloud to save them for you!!” another added.
The Daily Dot reached out to @daisybow_craft via TikTok comment.
