We are now living in a history glut; the Internet has muddled the line between past and present.

The transformation was slow at first, and hardly anyone besides librarians noticed. Project Gutenberg, founded in 1971, was a cheerfully radical effort to turn old books into text files. When the web came along, the Online Books Page appeared and began listing links to thousands of digitized titles. Then, after the turn of the millennium, the pace rapidly accelerated: Google set up Google Books, Amazon launched Kindle, and Archive.org started scanning public-domain works from libraries. Meanwhile, shifts in the economics of music, film, and video set off an explosion in the digitization of back catalogs, until then the furtive territory of file-sharing pirates. Spotify and Netflix, Apple and YouTube have all now built enormous businesses based on organizing the past for commercial exploitation. Suddenly we find ourselves living in an online realm where the old is just as easy to consume as the new. We’re approaching an odd sort of asymptote, as our past gets closer and closer to the present and the line separating our now from our then dissolves.

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There’s an irony here: All of the data we’re collecting, all of the data points and metadata, is history itself. Much as we marvel at Babylonian clay tablets listing measures of grain, future generations will find just as much meaning in our log files as they will in the media we consume. Sure, Frank Sinatra sang a bunch of songs; sure, Jennifer Lawrence was a big star in 2014. But the log files tell you who listened, and when, and where they were on the planet. It’s these massive digital archives—and the records that show how we used them—that will be the defining historical objects of our era.

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