Plain text outlasts

I have files from the nineties that no program will open anymore. The formats died with the companies that made them. But the plain text files from the same years open instantly, in anything.

That is the quiet superpower of text. It has no version, no licence, no host it depends on. A Markdown file is just letters and a few marks of punctuation pretending to be structure.

When I choose what to write in, I am also choosing how long it will live. Plain text outlasts almost everything else I could pick.