> The John Carmack’s of today will be remembered in detail with or without blanket archive efforts.
Sure, but this leaves us a distorted view of history, where we have lots of details on the lives of "great men" and next to none on how ordinary people lived. Which means the vast majority of people who lived and died in that period end up written out of their own history.
Archaeologists spend a lot of time rooting around in ancient rubbish piles and cesspools, because these are some of the very few places where physical evidence of how ordinary people lived has survived. Nobody in ancient times would have nominated those sites as culturally important or worthy of preservation. But what we know of how ordinary people in those times worked, played, ate and drank comes largely from things dug up from them.
Sure, but this leaves us a distorted view of history, where we have lots of details on the lives of "great men" and next to none on how ordinary people lived. Which means the vast majority of people who lived and died in that period end up written out of their own history.
Archaeologists spend a lot of time rooting around in ancient rubbish piles and cesspools, because these are some of the very few places where physical evidence of how ordinary people lived has survived. Nobody in ancient times would have nominated those sites as culturally important or worthy of preservation. But what we know of how ordinary people in those times worked, played, ate and drank comes largely from things dug up from them.