The same tends to be true of most complex phenomena in real life: stock markets, economies, the success or failure of companies, war and peace, relationships, the rise and fall of empires. Short-term analyses aren’t only invalid – they’re actively unhelpful and misleading. Just look at the legions of economists who lined up to pronounce events like the 2009 financial crisis unthinkable right until it happened. The very notion that valid predictions could be made on that kind of scale was itself part of the problem.

It’s also worth remembering that novelty tends to be a dominant consideration when deciding what data to keep or delete. Out with the old and in with the new: that’s the digital trend in a world where search algorithms are intrinsically biased towards freshness, and where so-called link rot infests everything from Supreme Court decisions to entire social media services. A bias towards the present is structurally engrained in almost all the technology surrounding us, not least thanks to our habit of ditching most of our once-shiny machines after about five years.

What to do? This isn’t just a question of being better at preserving old data – although this wouldn’t be a bad idea, given just how little is currently able to last decades rather than years. More importantly, it’s about determining what is worth preserving in the first place – and what it means meaningfully to cull information in the name of knowledge.