Trying to Perfectly Preserve Media completely misses how culture actually works
The increasingly common belief that everything must be preserved, whether it is a game, a book, or any other type of media, and that failing to do so somehow “destroys culture,” is, in my view, fundamentally mistaken. It ignores how culture has actually functioned throughout all of human history.
I believe that the loss of media is not automatically a tragedy. It is a natural and essential part of cultural evolution. I am not advocating for the active destruction of works. I am saying that the systematic and almost forceful preservation of every single thing simply because it exists is neither necessary nor historically normal.
Consider penny dreadfuls: cheap, disposable entertainment printed on low-quality paper that was never intended to last. Most of them are gone today. This is not a cultural disaster. It reflects what the society of the time valued and what it did not bother to protect.
Throughout most of human history, works survived only if people considered them valuable enough to keep, copy, or maintain, or if they survived by sheer luck. That selective survival shaped culture itself. When people look back at earlier decades and think, “Media was better back then,” they often forget that the only reason it seems that way is because the material that survived is the material people cared about. The forgettable and mediocre mass-market works disappeared, and so they no longer influence our impression of the era.
Loss is not always harmful. It is often revealing. Culture grows through selection rather than through perfect archival completeness. Future generations create new culture based on what the past leaves behind, whether intentionally or by coincidence. That process is how culture has always evolved.
For that reason, the idea that every piece of media must be preserved forever is not only unrealistic but also incompatible with how cultural development actually works.