Imagine being the person who laid down the invisible infrastructure that runs global finance, international communication, and the streaming audio you are listening to right now. Vinton Gray Cerf—widely known as the "father of the internet," a title he shares with co-developer Bob Kahn—did exactly that. Yet, instead of resting on his laurels, Cerf spends his later years sounding the alarm about a massive paradox: the digital world he engineered to survive a nuclear strike might not survive the simple test of time. Since at least 2015, Cerf has campaigned tirelessly against an impending "digital dark age," warning that because society stores the vast majority of its modern photographs, legal records, and historical data exclusively in digital formats, an unrecoverable black hole is closing in. We assume saving a file preserves it, but digital retr ...