Losing Alexandria

Why losing Google Drive would eclipse the destruction of the ancient Library of Alexandria

In the year 391 CE, a Christian mob led by Bishop Theophilus stormed the Serapeum in Alexandria, Egypt. As flames consumed the daughter library of the legendary Great Library of Alexandria, centuries of accumulated knowledge turned to ash. History remembers this moment as one of humanity’s greatest intellectual tragedies—the destruction of the ancient world’s most ambitious repository of learning.

But imagine, for a moment, if tomorrow morning every file stored in Google Drive simply vanished. Over one billion users worldwide would lose access to more than two trillion documents—a collection that dwarfs anything the ancient world could have imagined. Yet this hypothetical catastrophe would represent something far more complex and troubling than the loss of Alexandria: the erasure of humanity’s first truly global, democratically accessible knowledge base.

The Library That Never Was (Quite What We Think)

The mythology surrounding the Library of Alexandria has grown more magnificent over time than the institution ever was in reality. Modern historians estimate the library contained between 40,000 and 900,000 scrolls at its height, with the most conservative estimates placing the collection at around 40,000 volumes. The library wasn’t destroyed in a single dramatic fire, but rather succumbed to a slow decline over centuries, with various incidents contributing to its gradual demise.

More importantly, most of the library’s major works were also held by other libraries throughout the ancient world. When we lament the “lost” works of Alexandria, we’re often conflating the library’s destruction with the broader decline of classical culture. The most important works were widely disseminated elsewhere, meaning that the burning of Alexandria, while tragic, didn’t represent the complete erasure of ancient knowledge that popular imagination suggests.

The Digital Alexandria of Our Time

Google Drive presents a fundamentally different scenario. With over 1 billion users and 47.4% market share in file hosting services, it has become the de facto digital repository for an enormous swath of human activity. Companies using Google Drive store an average of over 100 data fields including documents, spreadsheets, images, and presentations. Google Workspace, which includes Drive, has over 3 billion monthly active users.

The scale is staggering. While Alexandria might have held the equivalent of a few hundred modern books, Google Drive hosts over two trillion documents—representing an almost incomprehensible volume of human knowledge, creativity, and communication. This includes everything from family photos and personal journals to cutting-edge research, business plans, and artistic works.

But here lies the crucial difference: most of this content is private.

The Privacy Paradox

The Library of Alexandria was designed as a universal repository—knowledge collected for the benefit of scholars and, by extension, humanity. Ptolemaic rulers demanded that all ships entering Alexandria’s harbor surrender their books for copying. The library represented an early attempt at comprehensive knowledge preservation and sharing.

Google Drive operates on the opposite principle. While the platform enables sharing and collaboration, the vast majority of its content remains locked away in private accounts. Family photos, personal documents, proprietary business information, creative works in progress, private correspondence—all stored in individual digital vaults.

This creates an unprecedented paradox in human history: we have assembled the largest collection of human knowledge and creativity ever created, yet almost none of it contributes to our collective intellectual heritage. The “burning” of Google Drive wouldn’t just destroy information—it would erase the private thoughts, memories, and creative works of over a billion people, most of which exist nowhere else.

What We Stand to Lose

Consider what a complete Google Drive loss would mean:

Personal Heritage: Millions of families would lose their digital photo albums, home videos, and personal documents. Unlike physical photos stored in multiple family homes, many digital memories exist only in the cloud.

Business Continuity: Over 1,000 organizations, including major companies like Salesforce and Whirlpool, rely on Google Drive for core operations. Entire business ecosystems would collapse overnight.

Research and Development: Countless research projects, academic papers, and innovative ideas exist primarily in private Drive folders, never published or shared.

Creative Works: Musicians, writers, artists, and creators often use Drive as their primary workspace for works in progress that may never see the light of day if lost.

Educational Resources: Teachers and students worldwide have built vast repositories of educational materials and coursework.

The Cultural Cost of Privacy

The Library of Alexandria’s tragedy wasn’t just the loss of specific scrolls—it was the failure to preserve knowledge for future generations. Today, we face a different but equally troubling issue: we’re creating vast amounts of knowledge and culture, but keeping most of it private and therefore culturally useless.

This raises profound questions about how we handle digital knowledge in the 21st century. Should personal data and creative works be treated purely as private property, or do we have a collective responsibility to preserve human knowledge and creativity for future generations?

The current system means that when individuals die, retire, or simply forget passwords, their contributions to human knowledge often die with them. Unlike the physical books that might survive in multiple copies across different libraries, digital works stored privately in cloud services represent single points of failure for irreplaceable human creativity.

A Risk We Cannot Afford

The potential loss of Google Drive would represent something unprecedented in human history: the simultaneous erasure of both personal memories and collective knowledge on a global scale. While the Library of Alexandria’s destruction was tragic, it didn’t erase the personal histories of millions of individuals or disrupt the daily operations of thousands of organizations worldwide.

Moreover, the centralization of so much human knowledge in the hands of a few technology companies creates systemic risks that dwarf anything the ancient world faced. Server failures, cyber attacks, corporate decisions, or geopolitical conflicts could trigger losses that make the burning of Alexandria look like a minor footnote.

Toward Cultural Data Protection

Perhaps it’s time to reconceptualize how we think about digital preservation. Just as we have systems for preserving physical cultural artifacts—museums, libraries, archives—shouldn’t we have robust systems for preserving digital culture?

This doesn’t mean violating privacy or forcing people to share personal information. Instead, it means:

• Redundancy: Ensuring that important cultural and intellectual works exist in multiple, geographically distributed locations
• Cultural Archives: Creating systems that allow creators to voluntarily contribute works to long-term cultural preservation
• Digital Estate Planning: Developing frameworks for what happens to creative works when individuals can no longer maintain them
• Institutional Independence: Reducing dependence on any single company or platform for knowledge preservation

The New Alexandria

We’ve built something far more magnificent than the Library of Alexandria ever was—a global repository of human knowledge, creativity, and memory accessible to billions of people. But we’ve also created something far more fragile: a system where most of our collective intellectual heritage remains locked away, vulnerable to loss, and culturally inaccessible.

The question isn’t whether we’ll lose our modern Alexandria—it’s whether we’ll learn from history and build systems robust enough to preserve not just the knowledge we create, but the human experience itself. The ancient Library of Alexandria was destroyed by fire and neglect. Our digital Alexandria faces threats of centralization, privacy paradoxes, and systemic fragility.

The choice is ours: will we let our digital knowledge repositories suffer the same fate as their ancient predecessor, or will we create systems that truly serve humanity’s long-term intellectual and cultural needs? The stakes have never been higher, and the collection has never been larger. We cannot afford to lose this Alexandria.

Originally published on LJHoliday 2025-07-14