The news emerged this week that, amid a data migration project, Myspace had deleted all the music uploaded to its site between 2003 and 2015—an estimated 53 million files. That is poor archiving, to be sure, particularly given the role the social network played for music in the pre-streaming era. In the mid-2000s, Myspace helped to launch young acts into the millennial zeitgeist, from Lily Allen to Arctic Monkeys, and served as a digital watering hole for fans of emo and beyond. The songs that artists and users alike uploaded to their pages, via MP3s, were key to the semi-legal discovery methods of the ’00s.

But what is most telling about this massive loss of digital data is that it actually happened months ago, and few seemed to take notice of or complain about the broken links. Which would seem to make the Myspace story less about a loss of information, than about a loss of interest.

I don’t mean a loss of interest in any particular music among those 50 million files—each of those songs holds greater and lesser meaning to different individuals. But the larger disregard of Myspace suggests a collective loss of interest in the type of history we associate with archives—a reconstruction of a specific moment in the past. Digital media never allow for that kind of stopped time. Myspace was always in flux, just as all websites are. How do you archive an interactive, ever-changing space?

The digital environment presents all kinds of pitfalls to traditional archiving. Not only is the subject constantly changing, it is often locked into proprietary formats directed by commercial interests. The resulting tragicomedy is perhaps best illustrated by the modern Domesday Book. The original, an exhaustive survey of life in Britain produced in 1086 for William the Conqueror, is still in existence, and easily consulted by historians. In 1986, 900 years later, the BBC (together with a group of corporate sponsors) undertook a digital update, soliciting contributions from a million school children and spending millions of pounds to compile two LaserDiscs of video, audio, and data in a Philips format called LV-ROM. By 2002, no one could open it. Various attempts have been made since to recapture the contents, with only limited and temporary success.

It’s follies like this that have led some to speculate about a “digital dark age,” a period of history that will be largely blank due to lost information—like a giant broken link when the future tries to look back at our time. It’s not hard to imagine, because living and working with digital media is to continually lose access even to one’s own past.

If I try and count the formats I’ve already lived through, I can feel like a very old man. My career as a musician started in the late 1980s, first in the band Galaxie 500 and then as Damon & Naomi, which means I now have closets filled with superannuated digital audio media: PCM, DAT, ADAT, minidisc... And because my bandmate Naomi and I publish books under the imprint Exact Change, we also have boxes of antique data storage systems: floppy disks, Bernoulli boxes, Zip disks, and hard drives with ports whose names I’ve lost along with the cables that fit them. Few if any would work, I am sure, even if I could somehow plug them in.

I don’t even know why I’ve kept so many of these physical containers of digital data, except that when each appeared it seemed most useful, ironically, for archiving purposes. And so Naomi and I treated them that way, moving our data that we hoped to preserve from one to the next, to the next. Not to mention endlessly translating that data between programs, as we seek to keep these digital files we save useable. Regardless, failures crop up all the time: an unreadable document, a font that will no longer open, a corrupted file.