Knowledge That Does Not Last

By Marco Bizzarini

April 2026

I recently tried to listen to an old CD from the 1980s. It no longer worked. It was digital, so it was supposed to last. In reality, it was already dead.

This is not merely a technological issue. It is a sign.

For a long time, we have associated the digital with the idea of preservation: infinite archives, permanent access, total memory. Experience suggests otherwise. Storage media deteriorate, formats become unreadable, websites disappear, links break. Digital memory is powerful, but unstable.

And so the question becomes unavoidable: how much of the knowledge we produce today is actually destined to last?

The problem is not scarcity, but excess.

In the humanities in particular, the production of knowledge has grown exponentially. Articles, essays, monographs, conference proceedings multiply without interruption. This is not necessarily a matter of poor research. It is a systemic logic: publishing has become a requirement, not always a consequence.

The result is evident: a growing mass of content that accumulates without organizing itself. We write a great deal, we read little, and we forget quickly.

In this context, the very idea of sustainability needs to be reconsidered.

Not in an environmental sense, but in an epistemological one.

Knowledge is sustainable if it can be transmitted, understood, and reused. If it remains accessible over time. If it does not vanish at the very moment it is produced.

This implies a profound revision of current practices.

Not everything needs to be published.
Not everything needs to be analyzed.
Not everything needs to be preserved in the same way.

The idea that knowledge coincides with accumulation is one of the most deeply rooted illusions of our time.

In this context, sustainability coincides with selection.

Selection does not mean impoverishing knowledge, but making it usable. Giving it direction. Preventing it from dissolving into an indistinct mass of materials without hierarchy.

The problem of the humanities is not crisis: it is that they produce knowledge that does not last.

And knowledge that does not last, however formally correct, is destined to disappear without leaving a trace.