Inspired by the post about the hieroglyphs the one dude hoped would last forever.
People always talk about future historians being confused at memes and old forums, but surely a lot of catastrophic events could just wipe out the internet wholesale, right? If something REALLY COOL 
like a giant meteor wiped out everybody, what if aliens came along and were deeply confused that our culture seems to end randomly in the mid 2010s, subsumed by an internet whose only remaining shreds are references in big scientific studies?
The history textbooks on our dumb asses would surely read “and the humans all talked into screens and used “hyper links” to share information and opinions. Very little is known about this obscure human ritual as no evidence can be found of its existence beyond scattered references in ancient texts contemporary to its existence.”
Thinkin bout the impermanence of the internet rn
The content of the internet would not exist but the remains of its infrastructure would survive so presumably alien anthropologists would be able to infer a lot from that
Also lots of academic books printed on paper about the internet and society in pretty much every university library on Earth.
I’m still mad I had to personally pay for the archival ~300 year paper for three copies of my thesis
“The internet was an interconnected system of cats in tubes…”