Back in my day (only a decade ago, but that’s like a million internet years) we might have called this “vlogging” but I haven’t really seen that word used in ages. Personally, I always thought of vlogs as prepared essays with with visual components. To me the whole point of doing a video to show viewers examples of the stuff you are talking about. What Anita Sarkesian is doing is a good example: well researched, well edited, succinct, to the point visual essay with concrete examples of game-play and game dialogs. On the other hand, someone just talking “off the cuff” into the camera for twenty minutes in a single unbroken cut is…

Well, to me it just seems lazy. Here is the thing: I can read faster than you can talk. Therefore, if you have a message you want to get out there, the most efficient way of doing this is via text. Text can be absorbed very rapidly, even if it is an unstructured stream of consciousness jumble. I can skim long articles pretty quickly without losing too much information, but there is simply no way to skim a video. You can skip around, but that’s not the same. Skipping feels lossy. When I skim I can still look at the length and shape of the paragraph, check the opening and closing lines, scan for relevant keywords within and etc.. The best YouTube can do for me at the moment in this respect is to show me still thumbnails of what I can expect to see on the screen when I skip to that point. Which, if I’m watching a 20 minute unbroken rant, is always going to be your face.

Writing things down takes some effort. The very process of arranging words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs and so on forces you to think about structure and flow. You can’t just vomit words in the exact order they pop into your mind. Written word has rules, and ignoring them yields unreadable and confusing mess. But if you use video, you can just ramble, talk in circles, get tongue tied, correct yourself and go on tangents without losing too much coherence. Our brains are pretty good at making sense from unorganized, jumbled speech, because that’s how we communicate on the daily basis. So you can talk to a camera the way you would talk to your friend, and chances are most of your viewers will at least get a gist of what you’re saying. But the fact people can comprehend what you’re saying doesn’t mean you are coherent, or that you are not wasting their time. Because you are.

Yep, that’s a dude who didn’t even bother getting out of the bathtub to share his brilliant insights on ethics in video game journalism.

If you turn on a webcam, and hurl words at it for an hour without at least an outline, and without at least some basic editing to remove filler words (umm.., err..) and stuttering you are saving yourself time while wasting mine. Considering that, according to some estimates, over 20% of sounds we make during regular, conversational speech are non-lexical vocables, false starts and corrections, this is rather inconsiderate. This is why you don’t usually see people speaking this way on TV or in movies (save for maybe, you know mumblecore stuff, which consciously mimics “natural” conversation patterns) because for the most part its just noise. Useless, pointless interference that is not conducive to getting your message across.

So if you have some thoughts you want to share, write them down, kinda like I’m doing it here. Put these words on Medium, or Twitlonger, or one of the other five million sites designed to facilitate exactly that. Ranting into camera is just lazy.

Then again, maybe I’m just getting old. Perhaps there is a generational shift away from textual communication happening right now. And why not? It has never been easier to publish video online, and with ubiquitous broadband and storage we don’t have to aggressively edit for size, like we used to. So people are taking advantage of this.

There is this vision of the future that worries me quite a bit: one in which text is dead. In this future all interfaces we input data using touch and speech, and all output is visual and verbal. Humanity is mostly illiterate (save for handful of historians and archivists who study old text) but not uneducated. Poets and writers simply dictate their books to machines, because we perfected speech processing algorithms, and we have them read to us by descendants of Siri, who have perfect cadence and inhumanely soothing voices. Scientists and engineers dictate their papers and equations. Math is done in-silico…

Have you noticed how no one ever types in Spike Lee’s Her?

But would that even work? Can you read and write scientific papers without the ability to skim? Can you write good code, without actually… Writing? Up until now, education and literacy were inseparable: one depended on the other. But can technology disentangle the two? Can it help to create a society of highly educated analphabets, and would that even be a desirable thing? I’m inclined to think that this future simply won’t happen, because text is just too fast, efficient and convenient. It compresses insanely well, can be searched and indexed with frightening speed and efficiency, it can be absorbed much faster than audio and it can be translated without artifacts and side effects (such as lip movement being out of sync with dubbed speech on video). I just don’t see us ever giving up all the benefits of text, without getting anything in exchange. Because even if we get perfect speech recognition software, and machines can interpret our commands with flawless accuracy, talking is still slower, less accurate and less focused than writing. It just would not make any sense to abandon it.

But, Spike Lee’s movie Her does provide a vision of the future in which no one ever types anymore, but people still do read. And that is potentially something that could happen one day. And that’s my worst nightmare, because I can only ever properly organize my thoughts when I write. Which is one of the reasons I never felt compelled to make these sort of stream of consciousness type videos. Vocalizing my thoughts adds another layer of abstraction and takes me that much farther away from my message. I feel that dictation is nowhere near as flexible as typing. For example, have you ever tried to someone how you want them to re-format a document?

Can you copy that sentence… No that’s too much… No, actually I meant this sentence, and the short one afterwards. Now cut them out, and put them… Wait, scroll up a bit. No too much. Lower. Third paragraph… Sorry, I guess technically that’s fourth if you count that single word over there as a paragraph. So we put it here, but now we have to change it up to fix the flow…

It usually takes five minutes to explain to a human something you could do yourself in five seconds. Now imagine parsing all of this in an unambiguous way that can be understood by a machine. Editing text with speech would be a nightmare. In fact, editing anything with speech seems like an uphill battle. I think we would literally have to invent new, un-ambigous sub-dialects just to efficiently interface with machines. Or maybe learn Lojban.

I think what we’re seeing here is just laziness, and not some generational paradigm shift.

Then again, I have been wrong on things like these in the past. If this is the way of the future, I will have to adopt to that new, nightmarishly inefficient world. I don’t want to be the bitter old man who doesn’t get the new technology and refuses to get with the times. And at the very least, this strange future without reading and writing would result in more engaging, and visually pleasing Powerpoint presentations without bullet points…

In this case my brain decided that “My cousin bought a really fancy aparat fotograficzny to take pictures of the baby…” was a perfectly valid English sentence and it wasn’t until my mouth tried to make the appropriate sounds that I realized I suddenly switched language contexts. I couldn’t find “camera” so I went the descriptive route and said “the, um… picture taking… thing”. My friend tried to guess what I had in mind and said: “Phone?”

It’s funny, but seeing how it’s almost 2015, yes phone is actually a pretty good guess. After all, the only people who bring dedicated photo camera devices to events are professional photographers and elderly grandparents. So it stands to reason that my friend, who happened to be slightly younger than me associated taking pictures with the exact device that is used for that purpose most often these days.

I remember that when I was an undergrad, we talked about technological convergence as a fairly abstract concept. It was something we presumed would happen, though we were not exactly sure how. We also thought that Neo’s flip phone in The Matrix matrix was like the coolest thing ever, and we would have never considered putting a computer onto it because that’s not what phones were for. Little did we know that this would be the device that technology would converge on.

Think about it, you phone has now replaced and superseded most of the electronic and non-electronic devices we have used in the 80’s and 90’s. Let me give you a few examples:

	The 90’s	Year 2014
Device you use to take pictures?	Camera	Phone
Device you use to check the time?	Watch	Phone
Device you use to take videos?	Camcorder	Phone
Device you use to listen to music on the go?	Walkman	Phone
Device you use to blast loud music on the beach or at a party?	Boombox	Phone
Portable gaming device?	Gameboy	Phone
Device you use to record your voice?	Dictaphone	Phone
Device you use to cheat in math class?	TI-83 Calculator	Phone
Device for receiving text messages?	Pager	Phone
Device you use to check your email?	Computer	Phone
Device you use to watch movies?	VHS Player	Phone
Device you use to connect to the internet?	56k Modem	Phone
Device you use to organize addresses and phone numbers?	Rolodex	Phone
What do you use to organize your schedule?	Pocket Planner	Phone
What do you use to write quick notes and reminders?	Notepad	Phone
Device you use to keep track how many steps you take in a day?	Pedometer	Phone
What do you use to find driving directions?	GPS Unit	Phone
What do you read on the bus / plane?	Paperback Novel	Phone
Place where you keep all the store loyalty cards?	Key Chain	Phone
What do you use to pay for your coffee at Starbucks?	Cash	Phone
What do you use to make long distance calls?	Phone	Skype

Ok, that last item is a bit of a joke, but not really. I hardly ever use my phone to make actual phone calls. The other day I actually had to do a search for the phone app because I stuffed it in some folder to make space on the first few pages for the apps I actually use all the time.

Here is another interesting thought: a lot of people today are very skeptical of wearable technology. Devices such as smart watches or Google Glass type eye-wear may seem silly and gimmicky right now. But in 1999 this was exactly how I felt about smart phones – all I wanted back then was a cool, thin, switchblade style flip phone like Neo had. I could not have imagined that mere 15 years later my phone will be several times more powerful computing device than my Gaming PC was back then. But here we are.

If you told me one of my students will bang out a the assigned essay an hour before the deadline on their phone while sitting in the quad, I’d probably be skeptical. Bu that happened, and mad props to that student because there is no way I could ever type that fast on a touch-screen. I guess what I’m saying is – right now our technology is converging on the phone. Younger generations are fully embracing the mobile lifestyle, and many use their phones as their main computing platforms(which does explain the surge of popularity for the large screen devices). But it is silly to think that phones is where it will end. This is just a stage in a much larger process. At the moment we don’t know where it will go, but we do know that screen size is a limiting factor. Decoupling computing from a touch screen and expanding the display into your entire field of vision does offer many interesting new possibilities. Especially considering that we are already getting pretty good at the augmented reality thing.

So wrist mounted computation brick, coupled with Bluetooth connected eye-wear as a primary display is not necessarily a far fetched idea…

But in the real world, 404’s happen. The archives of this very blog are full of dead and blind links to lead to videos that no longer play and blogs that no longer exist. This is unfortunately how it works right now. We are still living in a scarcity based economy, and hosting still costs money. So when authors lose interest in their works and stop paying hosting fees, said works vanish. Stuff that is hosted on free services is more insulated against author neglect, and tends to stick around much longer but it is not permanent either. It’s survival depends more on a corporate business plan, rather than on the attention span of the author. And corporations, which are legally people here in US, don’t have infinite patience either. Things that do not yield profit or draw in new customers will eventually get purged from their servers. See the great GeoCities apocalypse of 2009.

One day we might have free energy, and more storage space we will know what to do with, and we will be able to keep things around forever. In the meantime this sort of slow entropy of the web is something we accept as inevitability. The internet, being what it is, has found ways to route around bit rot, via mirroring. Content may disappear, but as long as a single person saved a copy, it can be re-uploaded elsewhere. The old hyperlinks will remain broken, but thanks to search engines, the content will likely be easy to locate.

In a way, this process works much like human memory, but on a much larger, distributed and grand scale. Content that is irrelevant or has no value to anyone simply fades away. On the other hand, things we have collectively decided are good and worth keeping get copied, mirrored and preserved for future generations to enjoy. Parts of the web may become broken due to natural entropy, but as a whole, the internet keeps on chugging. In fact, the damage and healing process makes it healthier by culling old spam and advertising crap.

But every once in a while, something else happens: and infosuicide. A beloved or respected member of a community suddenly disconnects and goes offline and takes all their content with them. Their blogs, social media accounts and source code repositories go away overnight. And it is not because their work ceased to be relevant, but rather because they no longer wished to participate in the digital life on the web. The two most famous examples of this was the disappearance of _why the lucky stiff in 2009 and Mark Pilgrim in 2011. Both men are reportedly still around, and in good health, but simply chose to unplug from the web for personal reasons. Internet of course recognized their disappearance as damage, and routed around it, so even though their work temporarily vanished when they left, their legacy has since been restored and preserved almost to the last bit of data.

Infosuicide

Why did _why and Pilgrim choose to quit the semi-public life on net? We might never know the exact reasons (nor are we entitled to know them) but the very act of unplugging from the web strongly indicates a desire for privacy. It is shutting off the valve, closing the door, turning a new leave or starting a new chapter of their life. People do this sort of thing in real life all the time: they quit jobs, switch careers and abandon hobbies, and it is not considered all that strange. That people change and move on is a fact of life. But the internet is a weird place, where everything is interconnected. When your hobby is public and internet facing one, it is hard to quit it without people noticing.

When a popular writer stops writing, or a popular singer stops singing their fans do notice, but they don’t typically consider this a suicide equivalent. But when an internet person stops internetting, we coin a new word to describe it. Why is that? Perhaps it’s because digital celebrities have a more direct and intimate relationship with the people who consume their work. Both _why and Pilgrim were very active members of their respective communities, and the online technology circlejerk (yeah, you know that that’s what we’re doing – don’t even lie) as a whole. They were accessible and available, up until they were not. And that probably why people were so shocked by their sudden “disappearances”. Individuals who were there, day in and day out, suddenly fell of the grid erasing all of their footprints and contributions to the community. And while they did not disappear as real, flesh and bone people, their digital avatars were extinguished, their legacy living on only through imperfect third party mirrors.

The interesting question is how do infosuicides play into the greater scheme of transhumanity. Eventually, we might have capacity to live forever, if not in the flesh, then in some sort of a virtual form. And yet, our attention spans might always be finite. There is a great short story that I read years ago (before I started writing such things down for future reference) which described post-human lives of digitized people living in digital simulations. Their universe was a seemingly endless sea of simulated realities, both mundane and fantastic. People could freely move between them, but they were viewed as communities rather than places to visit. You would move into one of them, get to know your neighbors, develop relationships, pursue hobbies, accomplish your goals… And then eventually, you would get bored and move on to the next community. The process was strangely reminiscent of infosuicide: an individual would just get up one night, set their house on fire and leave without saying goodbye.

Endless Virch Worlds

This might seem rude and inconsiderate, but it made sense in context. Moving away to another virch-world was the closest to perma-death these people could ever experience. You would leave alone and at night to save everyone the emotional trauma. You burnt your house so that it wasn’t there to remind people about you. But the goal of moving was always self preservation: to leave before soul crushing boredom and monotony drives you insane. You were moving to become a completely new person in a completely new world, and to do that you would cut all the old connections and often underwent elective memory surgery. It allowed immortals to live many fulfilling lives and be many things while unencumbered by their ever-lengthening past. It was an extreme measure but it seemed to be a right one for a civilization whose technology relegated time and space into meaningless metaphors. But it also spoke volumes about how they connected as people. Impermanence of relationships was implicitly built into their social contract.

We mortals don’t work that way. It is kinda funny that even though our lifespans are shockingly short, we speak in infinities when it comes to relationships. We bond forever. We marry “until death do us part”, with an implicit promise of continuation in case of afterlife. Once someone is in your social circle, they are never expected to leave, unless you have a falling out. Even if you drift apart in real life, you still are expected to, at the very least, post that obligatory “happy birthday” note on each other Facebook walls once a year. We extend that expectation of permanence to our online relationships as well – to people we have never met, and who we mostly know through their work, and brief online exchanges in regards to shared interests and hobbies. And when they disconnect, it is shocking, though perhaps it shouldn’t be. Perhaps this is something we need to learn to live with. This is something we might see more and more in the future.

Part of it has to do with privacy, which we are severely lacking right now. We live in a weird bubble of privacy deprivation right now. Most of our tools and communication media are built around noble concepts of openness and transparency, which is great, except they enable (or even encourage) us to over share. Combine this with excellent record keeping, and the culture of obsessive mirroring (the self healing property of the internet, which is great except when it isn’t) and incredible fidelity of our search algorithms and you get a strange digital panopticon where everyone can be doxxed, and their lives tracked, judged and analyzed. The more prominent you are within your community, the more naked you feel on he internet. Some of us thrive in this semi-public, semi-open, semi-exhibitionism of the internet. Others, not so much. Can you blame them for wanting to disconnect and live quieter, more private lives?

The web, as it exists right now, thrusts this openness and transparency upon you. It insists upon it, and while privacy tools and controls exist, it is still extremely easy to over-expose yourself, whereas maintaining privacy and separation between online and private life requires constant vigilance. This is already a problem, and it will only intensify as our lives become more and more tied to the electronic networks we create. One day we will inhabit these virtual spaces not metaphorically, but as immortal digital constructs. We really need to start building privacy controls and sane privacy defaults into our virtual spaces right now, before its to late and you’re getting snapshots of your consciousness being made and posted on torrent sites for lulz.

Here is another interesting question: given someone’s comprehensive body of work and digital footprints (blogs, tweets, facebook posts, forum duscussions – anything and everything they have ever posted online) will we one day be able to build a personality construct that would reliably and predictably mimic that person? This is not a novel concept after all. Just of the top of my head, Stross, Vinge, Stephenson and Simmons all had characters in their novels who were artists, poets or writers algorithmically “resurrected” from their works. While John Keats might have laid his soul bare in his poems to the point he could be digitally recreated in Hyperion Cantos, I’d venture a guess that one’s twitter and facebook feeds, and reddit comment history could be just as useful (if not more) for the same purpose. In fact, activity feeds and blogs might be easier to analyze and more algorithmically convertible into identifiable behavioral patterns than esoteric medium such as poetry.

Digital Personality Construct

So let’s say future community centered around some future programming language (let’s call it Emerald, just to continue the trend of Pearl and Ruby) has a whimsical and much celebrated mentor and teacher (let’s call him _where) who commits infosuicide. Could said community then take _where’s body of work, and clone themselves a digital copy of him to carry on the legacy? The new _where would not be an impostor – he wouldn’t be replacing _where the person, but instead would be a heuristic approximation of him, designed to carry on his spirit, ideas and continue guiding and contributing to the community. Legally he would be his own person, with no rights or claims on _where’s property, or accounts. Building him would likely not be illegal – or rather no more illegal than creating any kind of artificial intelligence. He would be merely a product of plugging bunch of publicly available records into some sort of neural network to produce a heuristic personality model. In many ways he would be a more perfect and focused _where than the original could ever even aspire to be. He would be an idealized, pure version of the original, based on his public image, with no personal baggage or inner turmoil.

If you think about this, it fits into the self-repairing pattern of the internet: disappearance of a mentor is treated as damage, and repaired by the community. They have their old mentor back, while the original gets to live a private quiet life he desired. Everyone wins?

The question is, is this right? Is this something we should be doing if it becomes possible? We have privacy laws that protect any and all information about you that you consider non-public. So stealing digital backups of your mind and bootstrapping a copy of you based on them would surely be illegal. But making an imperfect copy based on recordings of your public appearances and the body of the content you make available online, could very well be perfectly legal. But would it be morally right? Not only with respect to you, but also to the construct who (if self aware) has to live with the burden of being a mere shadow of someone else.

What do you think?

To be honest, it’s a rather strange… Well, medium, but not because of the technology and design aspect but rather the content which is best described as profoundly obnoxious. By that I mean, that it can sometimes be insightful and profound, but most of the stuff that shows on my dashboard (or feed, or whatever you call it today) is just god awfully obnoxious, self aggrandizing, insufferable, “I am success story, and so can you!” digital circle-jerk. So naturally I decided to ruin it for everyone by posting profound bits like How I taught a hobo to program in 7 days (and so can you). But this post isn’t about Medium though feel free to hijack the comment thread if you wish. That’s what it’s there for.

I mention Medium because it was through it that I stumbled upon a bastardized version of this article. Also, because intro paragraphs are hard. The linked post is actually kinda long, which is why it was re-cut and reduced in scope to fit on Medium. Either that or it was mangled by that extra polished post editor of theirs (when will people learn that no matter how hard you polish that WYSIWYG turd of a concept, it will never become any less shitty). Either way, the core of the piece is this video of Louis CK talking about smart phones.

Heavy stuff right? No it is not. It’s a comedian doing a bit on Conan. I have no clue when standup comedians have become the sage philosopher kings of the internet but apparently this is what we are doing now. This is how we do profound now. But fine, let’s run with this. Wisdom of the YaR and all that.

Comedy can be used to communicate profound and educational messages. Louis does make a few interesting points in this short video. I think that the most important bit was at top of his rant, when he humorously depicted how technology can potentially be a barrier for learning empathy. Everyone here is probably familiar with the another bit of comedy wisdom known as the John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckward Theory which comments on how anonymous publicity can alter online behaviors. Louis CK poses an interesting question as to what happens if this altered behavior becomes the norm? What if an individual never reaches the “Normal Person” status because of a digital barrier that has imposed public anonymity on them too early?

John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckward Theory

We are all born as self centered egoists, and only through socialization do we learn crucial civilization building skills such as empathy. Altruistic behaviors are learned, and they often countermand baser instincts such as self preservation. And yet they have allowed us to build thriving societies. But what if that socialization is retarded by artificial means?

You could say that my generation was raised by daytime TV and Hollywood blockbusters. The glass tube was the analog babysitter and information teat via which the neglected and under-parented masses learned their values. And to it’s credit, that medium actually tried to impart some values upon the younger viewers. Chief value was of course brand loyalty, but selfless hero archetype was strongly represented. So there was at least that.

What medium do the digital denizens of today get their parenting from? What is the automated babysitter of this generation? I shudder to think that it’s 4chan, reddit and the social media sprawl. What heroic archetype do these platform rise above all else? A smug, conceited internet troll perhaps? What if these kids become arrested at this stage of development, and never move on.

Are we rising our very own Vile Offspring who will in the future tolololo-loop our virch-spaces and erase our backups for the LULZ? Will post humans be weakly-godlike raging sociopaths?

The answer is no. Call me an optimist, but I think that while technology can be a barrier, it can also be a channel that helps to develop empathy. Face to face socialization is overrated. People make a big deal out of it, but the truth is that the only way we can even remotely approach getting inside of someones head is by reading their written word. When you read a personal account or a story, you identify with the author, or character. You become them, and you experience emotions through them. The internet gives everyone a platform to publish their intimate thoughts either by writing, or via visual media of different kinds. Push button, share thoughts. Push another button, learn how to be another. I would have been much less of a person if I did not have this digital connection to the world.

There is a limited number of people you will meet face to face in your life, whose personal stories will change the way you think. How often do you read a blog, or forum discussion, or even a Medium post that moves you, and makes you consider things from a new perspective. One that you would never discover if it wasn’t for a random link, or random click. The internet is a funnel for empathy. And the torrent is only getting stronger, as we discover new paradigms and ways to share our thoughts. Soon, you won’t just read or listen – you will feel and experience with the author. Our vile offspring will not stay vile for long.

As for the rest of his bit, I feel that it is an old riff on this old “chest-nut”:

Good old Dresden Codak “Hole in Chest” comic.

The original article I linked like six million words ago actually quoted Pascal and Tolstoy. I’m quoting motherfucking Dresden Codak , because the YaR decreed comedians as the philosopher kings of now, and I am not going to go against the grain. Also, Aaron Diaz makes a really awesome stuff, and you should follow him on Twatters and Tumbalors and whatnot.

As to the looming emptiness inside, lets do an experiment. Put down your phone, close your eyes and just sit there. What do you see? What streams fup from within? Is it despair? Let me try…

Ok, all I get is a river… A river of stars, cut up with luminous streaks of Busard engines. I see an armada, at the helm of which stands a woman with an ambition to wrestle the throne away from the True Empress. To that with she enlists the thrice cursed seventh legion, travels beyond the veil to forge alliance with the Banshees and entertains the notorious pirate prince at her court hoping to us his numerous troops in the final conflict. Shit, it’s to late for NaNoWriMo, isn’t it?

Wait, what were we doing? Oh, right. I was supposed to talk about introspection. About that emptiness within. I remember reading a very poignant quote one day. Something about the fact that we spend our entire life working to get closer to other people, but when the time comes we die alone. In that final moment, it is just you, and everything else fades away. Don’t remember where it was from so let’s just say it was from a standup comedy routine, so we don’t anger the YaR’lings. I remember thinking to myself “thank the fucking God, like all I need is other people coming in and ruining my death with their bullshit”. In my defense I was a teenager, and it was long before I decided that dying is way old school, and I want to live forever through some Kurzwelian miracle.

Dear universe, please, please, please, kindly fuck off for a few hours. Kthxbye.

I guess what I’m saying is that while I acknowledge there is something to this notion, I can’t fully relate. CK is oversimplifying things, which is actually quite the norm for extroverts who can’t comprehend different cognitive makeups can possibly exist. I don’t have that hole. Or rather that icy swelling CK described in his video feels like a warm and cozy respite. When I’m driving my car, alone, left to my own thoughts I actually feel at peace. And it’s not that I’m a misanthrope of some sort. I just need to get the fuck away and be alone to get centered, and get my head straight. I’ve always been this way. Technology did not make me like this, and it also did not normalize me into an extrovert. Sometimes I fear I will end up like that guy from Zombieland who totally missed a Zombie apocalypse because he was kinda preoccupied and busy for a while. That if I don’t make a conscious effort to actually get out of my shell, socialize and explore, I will fall into some solipsistic black hole, forget how to interact with outside world, and what’s worse, be perfectly content that way and not give a shit that it happened. So there is that. Empathy is hard because not everyone fits into a neatly defined template. You can’t put my square peg into your round hole, and damn it, no it is not an innuendo.

Technology might be toxic in some ways, but then again what isn’t? It can be used as a barrier or a buffer to push people away. It can also be used as a bridge for social interaction. It’s all about how you use it. For every downside, there is a slew of wonderful benefits, and yet unexplored opportunities. Let kids embrace it, and find their own way with it. Guide them, but don’t hold them back. Be aware that human condition is a spectrum wider than you probably think. Not everyone works like you inside. In fact, few people probably do. We are all different. Technology is a bridge we are building. It is the best chance we have to truly get to know each other. Every man is an island, but now we have boats, and are slowly starting to figure out how to build underwater pipelines and bridges between us. If you reject this, if you shut it down, you bring that existential dread of a lonely death upon yourself.

Remember that you are the obsolete model. The children are our conduit to a brighter future. If you are lucky, they will take you along for the ride. But knowing how people are, most of the living will have to be dragged kicking and screaming across the digital divide…

Also, don’t get your philosophy lessons from a comedian. Instead get them from an internet guy with a blog, because blogs are journalism and therefore I am right.

Apparently this has been common knowledge among the parents of teenagers. While frequently not as hip and agile or fast on the uptake of new internet lifestyles, moms and dads of teens and tweens have a slight advantage over those of us in our 30’s who have yet to spawn a cyber-compatible genetic fork of ourselves into the world. These folks are plugged into the gestalt consciousness of the Young and Reckless generation (henceforth referred to as YaR) which has a built in technology barometer of coolness. I have interrogated several parental units of the cow-orker status, and they all corroborated the reports that teenagers are feeling Facebook in droves. Which, if you think about it, should not be surprising.

As the popular expression goes, “everyone and their mom is on Facebook”, and that precisely seems to be the problem here. What self respecting teenager would want to be a member of a social network used by their mom? Things used by one’s parents are automatically uncool. And so, Facebook seems to be a victim of it’s own success. Mark Zuckerberg managed to convince everyone that they need his platform, and the YaR collective promptly said “fuck this shit”, packed their bags and left. After all, how much fun can you have on Facebook when your dad keeps posting embarrassing comments on your even more embarrassing pictures, your grandma is spamming your wall with inspirational religious quotes, and your creepy boss is liking all your selfies.

Typical Facebook User in 2013

Facebook has become a social network for old people. It is something you use to keep in touch with mom and dad when you leave for college, and keep clean because you know employers have learned to dig it for dirt. All the risque, illicit, and therefore fun activity has long moved elsewhere. What is even more interesting is that it didn’t move to another social network, but rather became distributed.

The main problem with Facebook is that it became a social construct and as such it has lost the semi-granular privacy it’s users enjoyed in it’s heyday. For example, what does it mean when you don’t want to be “Fecebook friends” with someone? How do you explain to a parent or a distant acquittance why you have reservations about adding them without rising suspicion? While Facebook offers privacy controls, explicitly blocking someone’s access to parts of your profile may backfire when they compare it with what someone else can see and get offended. Facebook, for all it’s utility is very public and very high profile these days. I believe this host of issues has been codified as “Stan’s Dad Syndrome”:

So it is no wonder that YaR are moving towards services that are either low profile, and offer little utility to “gronw-ups” or choose networks built for privacy. In that first category we have services like Instagram and Vine which have been more or less built for hipster-filtered duckface selfies, and recording of immature meme-worthy antics respectively. As such they are not very attractive to parental units, who usually settle for occasional passive monitoring of said networks rather than joining in and trying to fit in.

The second category includes completely ad-hock social cliques maintained via messaging services like SnapChat, WhatsApp. These are particularly interesting because they offer point-to-point communication that is mostly ephemeral and difficult to monitor or mine for information. In other words, you can easily add your dad on SnapChat but it doesn’t mean he will ever have the opportunity to see the 800 silly selfies you produce every day.

In a way this is actually healthier behavior than the good old Facebook exhibitionism because it is less prone to embarrassing privacy failures, stalking and employment loss due to leaky privacy features, or your pictures ending up on unsavory image boards. This is actually a good thing. Teenagers are adopting to the digital world and mitigating risk by confining their stupid choices to mediums that at least superficially appear to have less tracking and less permanence. Which of course isn’t necessarily true, seeing how the seemingly ephemeral SnapChat photos can be easily captured via screen-shot and re-posted online. Still, the fact that capturing must be done in real-time and one can’t easily embark on a dirt digging expedition like this is the case with Facebook is definitely a good thing. On the other hand, if you are a parent, this means you have oversight and monitoring features and thus your endless, thankless job of protecting your precious, lovable, demon spawns from real and imagined internet dangers just got harder by a factor of three and a half.

No one I know is on Snapchat which I think means I’m officially too old for this service.

You could say that things like SnapChat are just a temporary fad, but isn’t that true of all social networks? Myspace was a fad. So was Facebook. Fads drive this business, and SnapChat creators are actually convinced that their fad is currently on the rise. They are so sure of it they recently turned down a 3 billion dollar offer from Facebook. That is correct, a small company with 0 profit told Zuckerberg to shove it, because they think they are worth much more than that. Which makes a lot of sense if you think about it. Their business model (well, lack of theroff but who the fuck needs business models when venture capitalists are willing to throw money at you indefinitely as long as you tell them fairy tales about about the value of your social graph) is to offer a refuge to the hungry and huddled masses of YaR’s disenfranchised by the fact their parents finally figured out how to use Facebook. They view Zuckerberg’s service as a waning empire on a downswing – it’s the titanic minutes after it hugged the iceberg. You don’t chain yourself to a sinking ship.

Are they right? I honestly don’t know. But there is no denying the fact that Facebook is seeing a mass exodus and decreased number of subscriptions. It used to be that teens would lie about their age just to get onto the service. Nowadays it is actually hard to entice the youngest generations to join the Mom and Dad Social Network even after they reach the proscribed age. So once again we see social media landscape shifting underneath our feet. It will be exciting to see where will it go from here.

The most fundamental flaw of the human memory is that recall is a read/write process. Unlike fetching a file from a hard drive which never actually changes anything, retrieving a memory is almost invariably modifies it. For each read operation, our brain issues a write back which both aids in future recall, but also taints the memory with new information. This process is cumulative and ongoing, causing your most precious memories to wear out the quickest. This is why you may often have trouble visualizing the face of a long lost love one without it feeling fake and distorted, whereas some inconsequential stranger from the past may stand out in your mind like a eery specter aglow with undeserved high fidelity of detail.

Most treasured memories fade the quickest because you recall them most often.

The side effect of this self-modifying loop is that we can’t remember who we used to be with any degree of accuracy. Without corrective feedback from the outside in the form of stories as recalled by your friends, video evidence or your own writing, your brain will retroactively modify and retcon your past self image, conviction and biases to fit the current ones. Unless you have experienced some life altering event that made you consciously change who you are for better (or for worse) you will likely feel as if you have always been roughly the same person you are now. Except for incremental accumulation of wisdom and life experience your personality and what is more important your self perception and self image, may seem either unchanged or more in line with currently held beliefs than it was actually the case. Sometimes it may get skewed the opposite way too: dwelling on past mistakes blows them out of proportion, turning minor events into major downfalls in with most of the emotional weight has been accumulated over time.

If you do possess a body of writing, especially one that covers personal subject you can often discover long forgotten parts of yourself. Reading your past work can sometimes be inspiring, and sometimes humbling, if not embarrassing experience. Your writing can encapsulate both your fiercest, most triumphant moments and your lowest and most shameful ones. It helps to ground you and reminds you that things you hold sacred now may mean nothing to you in few decades, and that your deeply held convictions may be something you will one day be a source of embarrassment and shame. It reminds you that your ability to reason is merely a function of the data points you are working with at the time. The only true path to wisdom is to be objective, keep an open mind and embrace change. Because change will come, whether you want it or not. Years from now, you will wake up a different person entirely. But you won’t know when or how that happened, because your memory will be retroactively edited to keep a consistent personality template throughout the years.

Here is the interesting part: if your memory is fully malleable, it means you can hack it. If you can direct or at least influence the distortions that get written back at least in a small way, you can potentially change how you remember yourself and by extension affect your current self image. The question of how can this be done is the difficult part. I do not have a foolproof method or a technique for hacking your memory. All I have is an idea.

Your personal writings – records, journals, blogs and etc are a form of permanent record that is not subject to the write-back distortion. However they are far from impartial, and often colored by your current biases, convictions, beliefs and obsessions. Unlike video or photographic record which preserves data points as they are, your writing saves an impression of as you see them. Or as you would prefer to see them, because, after all you can lie.

Granted, lying to yourself about concrete events is more or less futile. Your brain is pretty good at preserving actual events with real-life significance against this sort of self delusion. Besides corroboration from an outside source will always reveal such a lie for what it is, even if you manage to miss-remember something important. However the devil is in the detail, as those fade the quickest and are most prone to the write-back distortion. It’s not necessarily what you write, but how you write it that can affect future reading.

Written word can carry certain emotional payload. The mood of the piece is something you can control regardless of underlying facts or informational content. Can this, combined with artful omission of undesirable subtexts be used as an exploit vector? Reading a record of past event acts as a trigger that forces you to recall the actual stored memories. The words on paper tint said memories with altered mood and/or small detail changes. If enough time has passed since the writing, chances are you may no longer recall exactly what these changes were, or what mood you were trying to evoke so the genuine memory becomes altered by the new message. Think Butterfly Effect but more subtle. Instead of altering the fabric of reality, you’re altering your own self image or your emotional response to a given event.

Of course one day our memories will likely to be fully digitized and we won’t even need to rely on a unreliable write-back vector. We will one day be able to selectively edit and delete stuff that displeases you. Would you embark on such a journey of self-inflictive elective memory surgery? Would permanently gutting the digital records of your past by hand be considered self improvement or self mutilation? Is it better if you make backups?

New Digital Memories will seem crisp and reliable compared to old, murky bio-memories extracted from meat brains.

It’s interesting that a lot of science fiction treats memory as something sacrosanct and any meddling with it as undesirable and problematic. Memories are enshrined as the essence of self-hood, protected by check sums and guarded against corruption. But is the concept of self just a function of the data points from our memories? And if our brains constantly pollute and retcon our memories then isn’t our self-hood in constant flux anyway? Personality is not a fixed scalar value that will hash to the same bucket every single time. It is a constantly flowing value bound by range that changes over time. It is derived from past experiences, but it actively modifies those in real time as a response to incoming stimuli. That variability is what defines humanity at the moment.

What will happen to us when we digitize our memories and freeze them in un-malleable form without the write-back vector pollution? Will that make us more static, stalwart and resistant to change? Will we lose our flexibility? And in such case wouldn’t self improvement be a justified reason for manually hacking your memories, convictions and self perception? Wouldn’t you knowingly falsify a few things in your head if it meant you could drop some old inhibitions, unshackle yourself from your fears and become a better, happier and more successful person as a result? And how would that be different from therapists do today? Aren’t therapy just a systematized mind hacking marathons?

It would make sense that an independently evolved alien civilization would progress in a manner to our own. The exact details of their technological devices might differ from our significantly, as could the order of discoveries and scientific breakthroughs. However it is a fair guess that their civilization would follow an exponential growth pattern like ours did: with slow agricultural build up, quick industrial era exploding into information age and beyond. Many of them should have reached that stage long before us and moved far beyond us on the exponential curve.

The interesting question is this: if there is such a high probability of existence of one or more very advanced civilizations in this corner of galaxy, why haven’t we discovered sings of its activity yet? Or why haven’t they intercepted our radio noise and come visiting yet? This seeming contradiction is known as the Fermi Paradox.

Physicists and philosophers much smarter than me have already developed many varied and interesting hypothesis aiming to explain this paradox but it is always fun to muse about such things. So let’s see what we can say about it as Science Fiction fans and science enthusiasts.

The basic problem we have is that we are so far been incapable to detect any alien activity anywhere in the universe. However if we are trying to find aliens more advanced than us, chances are we won’t see them blasting radio communications into the void. If they have a few centuries of development on us, they have likely moved up on the Kardashev scale and rolled up their native solar system into a Matrioshka brain. So what we ought to be looking for are not not noisy spots, but rather quiet dark holes that radiate a lot of waste heat – a classic tale-tale of a Dyson Swarm like construct. So far we haven’t seen any of these out there.

Granted, our main search tool is the SETI project which is severely limited and criminally underfunded. The actual area of the sky we can “watch” at the same time is incredibly narrow. In essence the way we search for alien civilizations is akin to searching for a needle in a hay stack, by poking at it randomly with another needle. Only statistically there should be a lot of needles in there, so we will eventually poke into something that is not hay – or at least that is the plan.

I mentioned the exponential progress curve at the beginning of this post for a reason. Here is an interesting observation: assuming all other factors being equal, by the time a civilization starts blasting radio waves into the void of space, they are already on their way towards singularity. Consider our own situation: in terms of space flight, we are very, very backwards. We haven’t even explored our own moon properly and our knowledge of our solar system is based mostly on information gathered by unmanned drones. And yet, at this very moment we can already feel the pull of technological transcendence. The pace of progress is ramping up, and big technological breakthroughs happen every few months. We are rapidly breaking down computational barriers, we are extending Moore’s law beyond the point of feasibility and we are constructing high fidelity, high bandwidth communications array for less every day. Our lives two or three decades from now will be unrecognizably different.

So my little pet hypothesis is that by the time a sentient civilization starts to look to the stars as a realistic destination of travel they might be mere few decades away from the omega point after which everything changes. We are developed enough to understand this process and the inevitable turning point, but have no idea what may lie beyond it. With out current grasp of physics we imagine digital transcendence as sort of an inward turtleing move in which a civilization deconstructs their immediate environment to encircle their home star with computronium array. But this may actually not be what happens out there. The fact that we haven’t found any Dyson style mega-structures in the sky might be a good indication that the super-advanced aliens are past that stage. Or that they never actually attempted to build large scale computational arrays here, because our universe is not inherently stable.

Recently physicists finally caught and measured the elusive Higg’s Bosson, and based on the preliminary experimental measurements established that our universe is very likely to be contained a long lived, but not completely stable region of space. It is entirely possible that we exist in a bubble of “false” vacuum which can at any point collapse to a more stable state. Such a collapse would propagate through space at light speed, and subtly altering the fundamental forces that bind our universe together, and as a result changing how subatomic particles interact with each other. In other words, life, universe as we know it would be winked out of existence. In fact, this false-vacuum collapse might have already occurred somewhere beyond our light cone, and there is an ever expanding bubble of pure chaos rupturing stars at the speed of light en-route towards the milky way at the speed of light. Which means that we won’t know about it until it is to late, and even if we had some warning, there is no way for us to escape it…

But, a civilization which has achieved digital enlightenment long before our ancestors climbed down from the trees could theoretically have had ample time to predict the imminent false vacuum collapse and figure out a way to “migrate” to a more stable universe. It is very likely that as aliens transcend the physical and achieve immortality via digitization they all realize our universe is not a sustainable system and get the fuck out. And it probably takes them less than a century or two from the point at which they start blasting radio waves into the sky.

If SETI is ever going to find traces of alien civilizations, they will likely be inactive post-transcendence fossils – discarded, incomplete, de-synchronized Dyson swarms surrounding forgotten stars if we are lucky. Maybe some of our neighbors were nice enough to leave us some sign-posts of where we could find them. Perhaps there is some alternate, optimal plane of existence where we can meet all the past post-singularity civilizations that originated in a variety of unstable universes. Or perhaps the fate of all civilizations is an ultimate solipsism: create a pocket universe with optimal physics for computation, migrate inside and iterate until the end of time. I guess we will find out soon enough.

The aging process is cruel and unforgiving. And while I might be able to cope with frailty, decreased mobility and chronic pain, it is the mental deterioration that accompanies it that keeps me up at night. It has been scientifically proven that as we age our minds slow down, and become less apt at forming new neural connections. It is of course an evolutionary adaptation – our ancestors spent their youth learning survival skills in their environment, but after a while they knew almost all that there was to know and they did not need to specialize further. So their minds switched into fast retrieval mode – which made sense. The body moves slower, but the mind is able to react faster based on experience. If the environment changed requiring new adaptations the old would just die off, making room for the young ones whose minds were still flexible enough.

This of course is less than ideal in the information era with it’s exponential curve of progress. Ability to learn and adopt new technology as it comes in is one of the most important abilities you can have right now. Right now this sort of thing is as easy as breathing to me. I just absorb and move on. But how long can I keep it up? When is the breaking point? Will there be a day when I wake up only to realize I no longer understand the world around me?

I frequently see elderly people struggle with performing even the simplest tasks on their computers these days. I’m told it’s because these folks didn’t have computers and internet while growing up. Well neither did I really. Not until I was teenager at least. Besides, in 40 years we will likely have technology that is not yet around, which I will have to learn to use just like everyone else. Will my technology background be any help? Can I rely on it to fudge my way when I’m learning impaired due to the relative length of my telomers? I really hope so.

Frankly, I hope we can do away with the whole aging thing before I’m beyond hope for cognitive recovery. But to be pragmatic I must allow for a possibility for missing the immortality train by a few decades. While I’m relatively certain my children, or at the very least my grand children will probably never have to age or die, my ultimate fate is still up in the air. So I’m trying to prepare myself for the inevitable cognitive deterioration by differing to the intuitive wisdom of the young and reckless.

I’m in my 30’s now, so if you squint hard enough you could probably still lump me in with the “relatively young” demographic. But I’m slowly sliding out of that demographic bracket, and I can actually measure that progress by counting the hairs that have lost their pigmentation. Soon enough I will no longer be considered target demographic for video games and comic books by even the most generous web forms. And so I slowly have to treat my own convictions and intuition as slightly suspect – tainted by stillness of the ages.

You have to assume that the young netizens – those born to the digital world, those who suckled at the binary teat of the information superhighway – can grok the ebbs and flows of the web much more easily than us. We might have created this world and gave it shape, but they ultimately inherited it. They are the movers, the shakers and the ones who take our technology and apply it in novel, emergent ways we did not expect or predict. They are the architects of the brave new world that is being shaped to their specifications using our tools.

Granted, being young and reckless means they not always are using said tools responsibly or constructively. But whenever I see kinds doing something stupid on the internet, I try to stall the instinct to condemn it outright. Because what if I’m wrong? What if this emergent system is actually going to blossom into a new game changing paradigm. The fact that something doesn’t fit into an established pattern does not mean it is irrelevant or useless. Sometimes only a young malleable and relatively unshaped mind can stumble onto a new pattern, because it is not shackled into place by existing conventions. The young have the luxury of being stupid and being wrong, but sometimes good things come out of reckless abandonment of rules and good advices.

Therefore I will always look to the young for inspiration and boundless energy. My responsibility as I’m passing into later adulthood is to be their enabler and facilitator. I would have said guide but that would imply giving them direction which I don’t think is wise, because it immediately stifles the crazy unbridled creativity. It’s better to let them pick their own path, for better or for worse. Our job is to provide knowledge, technology and resources. We build tools and environments they can exploit to do their things, then we watch for sudden explosions of activity. We plug in and we build, and assist but refrain from steering unless we notice that the path they chose is definitely harmful and dangerous or that they have decided to re-invent the same old wheel once again. Cause they are prone to do that. Granted, sometimes reinventing the wheel might be beneficial as you might end up with a new, better wheel that runs in polynomial time or something. But mostly it’s a waste of time.

The Tabula Rasa state of a youthful mind can be an asset and we should not forget that as we chase after immortality. Because even if we retain agile minds, hundreds of years of accumulated experience will weigh us old timers down. We will have the wisdom, and the long view and the ability to build upon lessons gained from countless past failures, but that might make us static and predictable after a while. There will always be new minds created in the vast virtual worlds to come, and there will always be old men willing to take a scalpel to their memories in exchange for being vibrant, unbridled blank slate again, even if only temporarily.

I guess what I’m saying is that we should never underestimate the young and the reckless because the stupid shit they do sometimes may end up changing the world in ways we could never conceive. And it is best to instill that attitude in one’s mind now, while said mind is still capable of being reprogrammed. Perhaps that’s the only way we can remain at least marginally relevant as we age into oblivion, instead of just being in the way, and yelling at kids to get off the goddamn lawn.

Given a choice to live in any time period, which one would you pick? What is your favorite historical decade that you would like to make your permanent residence? Would you pick something in the last century? Would go go all the way to the middle ages? Ancient Rome? What is your dream era?

For me this is not even a matter of choice. The past more or less sucks, and I don’t think I could possibly go further down the time line than maybe 10-20 years. During the Hurricane Sandy I had a little taste of how it would be to live in a world without electricity and it almost drove me mad. Despite I had access to the internet for 8 hours a day at work, not having any power at home for about a week made me want to hang myself with my useless laptop power cord. I can’t imagine living in pre-internet era now. Granted, I grew up without internet and I was fine, but that was a long time ago and I didn’t know what I was missing.

I would be a pretty lousy time traveler too. All my work experience and most of my general skills and interests revolve around technology and modern living. Most of the stuff I’m into either requires electricity (programming, tinkering, experimenting with technology, video games) or is a rather recent invention (SF, Fantasy, pen and paper RPG, tabletop gaming, etc..). Not to mention I’m rather fond of the luxuries of modern life – I like my hot showers, my antibiotics, my clean filtered water, my refrigerators and my Keurig Coffee Maker that can brew me a cup of joe in seconds. Take all of that away from me and I would be pretty miserable. If I went back to middle ages, I would probably die fairly quickly from some infectious disease, or skewered with a sword for being bad at being an obedient peasant. Because, yeah – there is an overwhelmingly high probability that if you moved back in time you would end up being a random peasant. Most people who say they would want to live in the middle ages probably imagine they would be rubbing elbows with the lords and the ladies, but that’s not very realistic, isn’t it?

Not to mention the fact that I would much rather be a nobody in 2013 than a king in the middle ages. Why? Think about it – you might be rich and powerful, but you still have to live in a dank, cold castle, personal hygiene is a foreign concept to everyone at your court, dentistry involves a dude with pliers, the state of the art medicine involves leaches, bloodletting and prayer and everything around you is slow, stupid and non-interactive. I’d much rather be poor and powerless, but be able to carry a tiny computing device in my pocket that give me access to all of human knowledge and also funny pictures of cats.

If I had to go back, I would probably only move a decade or two and then used my knowledge of how the computing industry is going to develop over the next few years to put myself in a position to, say work with Larry Page and Sergey Brin on the early Google prototype or something like that. I really wouldn’t be interested living any further in the past. How about you?

Note that we are talking about permanent displacement in time – a one way trip if you will. There is no going back, or changing your mind. Would you do it? Which time period would you pick?

Of course if you were moved back in time by force, chances are you would eventually adjust and learn to live in that time period. Hell, there is a good probability you could even assimilate so well, as to forget and/or reject your true origin writing it off as a hallucination or a weird psychotic episode. So even if you regretted it at first, you would eventually find a way to live and be happy where you are.

But, my point stands – I think if you are living in one of the industrious, modern, developed first world countries right now, you have it way better than any of your ancestors did. The present is pretty awesome and I wouldn’t choose any other time period over it. The “good old times” that people reminisce about never really existed – those are just rose colored memories with all the dirt and grime filtered out by the passage of time.

But, would you be willing to destroy a beloved, priceless, antique, first edition book in order to make it into a cheep virtual commodity?

One of the major plot point’s in Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End novel is the so called library digitization project. You can think of it as Google Books initiative on crack. It is a massive undertaking that aims to digitize all of the world’s major libraries turning them into a fully searchable virtual archive available online. This would include rare, and unique one of a kind books that were never scanned before. The controversy surrounding the project stems from the rather unorthodox method of digitization.

The creators of the project utilize industrial strength scanners that are the state of the art technology at the moment. They are the most accurate and at the same fastest devices available on the market. The scan fidelity of this machines is incredibly high, which means they can OCR even very old, faded out books with nearly 99% accuracy, and they employ neural network that actually adjust their OCR algorithms as they scan, based on paper type, publisher, age of the book and dozens of other variables becoming more accurate the more you scan. The only downside of this process is that it is completely destructive. The book actually becomes shredded in the process, as the pages are cut up, and scanned piecemeal and then digitally reassembled. You dump bunch of books into the input bin on one end, and you get a bag of confetti on the other.

As you could imagine, this aspect of the project infuriates book lovers all around the world. There are people picketing in front of all the participating libraries and even violent incidents where the operators of the machines are attacked, or the machines themselves are sabotaged. And yet, more and more libraries join in, and more universities sign away their collections of old texts to be ground up. Why? Well, for one they are pragmatic.

Vinge’s near future setting is not that far removed from our own time. Libraries are no longer what they used to be. College students no longer go to libraries to check out books – they go there to find a quiet corner to study, or to use their Wifi/computer lab. Most of the materials they need for their school projects is digitized, so the stacks of books just sit there mostly untouched gathering dust. Local libraries not affiliated with educational institutions are in even worse condition – they get less funding, and fewer book donations every year. The main services they still perform are mostly digital – they provide the local community with free internet, and kindle/nook book rentals. Their book collections just sit there, gathering mold. If this trend continues, these places may have to close their doors in a decade or two… And then, what happens to all the books?

Granted, there re always half-measures: you could have preserved some of the more precious Rainbow’s End books and scan them in using more expensive and non-destructive methods. The problem was, no one offered to do that. There destructive digitization was the only offer on the table. The only viable, available and affordable way to preserve the book collections for eternity.

So this is the quandary: would you rather see your local library ground up, and converted into a searchable, online index that could theoretically be preserved for eternity, or would you rather keep it a regular library knowing full well it may fail and dissolve taking all the knowledge in the next decade or two? Do you defend the scarce, material jewels for their inherent value or do you destroy them for greater good?

I’m asking this question now, because our grand children may actually have to answer the same type of question on a much grander scale: what will they do with Earth. It is very possible that few decades from now we will embark on a grand project in which we will be re-purposing all the matter within our solar system into computronium, building a Matrioshka Brain structure around the sun. Earth is still in preferential high bandwidth area, merely solar minutes away from the energy source and thus it would be a prime target for deconstruction.

And yet, at the same time, how can you grind down the cradle of the humankind into fine dust to build processing nodes? How can you destroy all the physical mementos of our history and our culture? How can you just make all of it disappear? Can a virtual representation of Earth ever be anything other than a pale shadow of the original?

Then again, how can you not do it? How can you preserve Earth if the computronium swarms on the former Mercury / Venus orbits and in between will effectively blot out most of the sun rays turning our planet into an ice ball.

Is it ok to destroy to preserve and distribute? Or should you always try to protect the physical instance, regardless the costs and the risks? This is just something to ponder.