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The Crisis of Noise

/ðə ˈkraɪ.sɪs ʌv nɔɪz/ The abundance-dark-age paradox. Common in the post-2022 digital environment.
Definition A digital dark age not of loss, but of overwhelming, uncurated preservation. It is the state where meaning is drowned in a sea of synthetic, trivial, or decaying data, making the discovery of genuine human artifacts nearly impossible.

The Dark Age of Abundance

Historians often fear a "Digital Dark Age" where all our data is lost to format rot. The Crisis of Noise suggests the opposite threat: we might save everything, but find nothing. In an ecosystem where AI can generate millions of documents a second (Digital Plastic), and where every trivial social media post is stored forever, the signal-to-noise ratio collapses.

For the archaeobytologist, the challenge is no longer just excavation; it is Triage. We are not just looking for the buried potsherd; we are trying to find the one real shard in a mountain of plastic replicas.

Triage as the Cure

The only solution to the Crisis of Noise is rigorous curation. This is why the discipline prioritizes The Triage—the act of choosing what *not* to save is as important as the act of preservation. Without curation, the archive becomes a landfill.

Stratigraphy (Related Concepts)
The Triage Context Collapse Digital Plastic The Synthetocene