Digital Decay: Modern day parallel of the destruction of Bayt-al Hikmah

Of time, all things decay.

Bayt al-Hikmah, or famously known as The House of Wisdom, was once a major intellectual center initiated by the Abbasid Dynasty, was burned and destroyed after the Siege of Baghdad in 1258. Scholarly works including translations, scientific discoveries, philosophical texts, manuscripts, maps and observatory records were thrown into the Tigris by the Mongols. A vast legacy of human intellect and accumulated knowledge of great civilisation and empires was lost, contributing to the fall of Abbasid Caliphate. Ancient ideas, thoughts, habits, and heritage passed down to us in a physical medium such as paper, stone, woods. These materials decayed slowly but remained partially visible. Today, a modern parallel to this catastrophe is unfolding, not through fire or conquest, but through digital decay, the silent erasure of our accumulated knowledge.

What is Digital Decay?

Digital decay refers to the gradual degradation, obsolescence, or corruption of digital data and assets. This phenomenon occurs on both an individual level (e.g. lost photos, corrupted files, forgotten passwords) and societal level (e.g. dead links, outdated blogs, unarchived email and disappearing online documents). According to research by Pew Research Center, 54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists. In the same research, almost one-fifth of the tweets become inaccessible on the site just months after being posted. This statistics highlights how fragile the entire digital infrastructure is and the risks associated with losing important records.

Why does Digital Decay happen?

There are a few reasons contributing to digital decay, one of which is technological obsolescence. Files are encoded in outdated formats, either hardware or software. For instance, a wire tape may be obsolete in a few decades, and there might be little to no technology to retrieve the information. Other than that, all the unarchived guides and how-to’s, conversations and experiences on private and individual blogs are lost in the essence of time. Conversations and information hosted on Myspace, for example, are not fully archived after the services were shut down.

Hardware failure is next. Hard drives, SSDs, and servers are all meant to be the storage for data digitally. However, all of these are prone to wear and tear and losses. For example, it is hard to access Flash-based content now due to the decay of information and the lack of devices or solid software to run it.

Third, data corruption occurs due to various factors. In a world of the internet, software bugs, malware, and viruses are things that are unavoidable. Outside of those internal software issues, hardware problems are also possible, such as power outages and transmission errors when transmitting data. It is a reminder that all digital information is binary code, without its material form — unlike the 1687 BC scrolls found in pyramids, which are in good condition and can still be read, or like the clay tablet informing the complaint of a copper scam. All the data while transmitting is prone to losses, where corruption of information happens.

Also, this digital data can be lost due to updates or changes made by tech companies. For example, Instagram is no longer giving access to all users to submit a filter on a story starting January 2025. Around 50k user-made filters are no longer there or accessible. This is one example of digital decay.

Therefore, how do we minimize this digital decay? On an individual level, we can opt for a few things: adopt an open and interoperable file format. It is recommended for internet users to use widely accepted formats, for example, for docs to use .pdf or .txt, sheets to use .xlsx or .csv, images to use .jpg or .png, etc., to ensure they are accessible or operable according to the current technological advancements.

Next is to practice digital hygiene. Educate yourself about cybersecurity best practices. Use a VPN, and do not use publicly accessed Wi-Fi when doing data sharing, banking transactions, or online shopping to avoid theft and scams. Instill a culture of recognising and resisting phishing attempts and cyber scam schemes.

Also, follow archival best practices. Consider a physical form of media to archive your memories. Take pictures, save them in trustworthy online storage services like Google+, cloud, etc., or print them physically so they can be preserved if there are any instances of digital decay.

It is also important to expand beyond technical fixes, as an attitude shift is needed. People don’t see digital preservation as urgent. On an individual level, we might do some kind of preservation to save our photos and videos of our memories and loved ones properly, but how about on an institutional and societal level?

In response to digital decay, two types of digital archives are gaining traction: born-digital archives and digitized archives. Some of the techniques used to collect and preserve digital materials are digital storage technologies (Cloud, data centers), archives like Internet Archive, a nonprofit library including millions of free texts, movies, software, and websites using its Wayback Machine that goes back in time to provide snapshots of the web and also the End of Term Web Archive, used by certain governments around the world to preserve digital government records for future use.

Although there are initiatives to do so, they are not sufficient and cannot fully keep the original intent, context, and functionality of the content. Digital data grows every day, and the demand is gaping further. It is a challenge for governments and institutions to do their part by collecting, polishing, and prioritising which data should be preserved. On an individual level, preservation can be done physically and should be done by everyone.

In conclusion, it is important for us to understand the risk of digital decay, how it happens, and what ways we can use to minimise this seemingly silent threat to our advancement of knowledge and the preservation of tradition and cultural heritage. As the reader, ask yourself: what knowledge will future generations lose because we failed to preserve it? What kind of information, the history of all sides, will be lost, causing misinformation and regression in advancement — if digital decay occurs?

This is what happened to us with the Bayt al-Hikmah. We do not know how much knowledge is lost due to the destruction, and the same thing can happen in the future if we decide not to take this problem seriously. Just as those scholars worked to preserve knowledge through writing and translations, we must now actively protect digital information.

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Irfan Rosdin