Proposal for DareConf 2013 http://dareconf.com

gistfile1.md

Digital Legacies and Death

Primary theme: Vulnerability and courage

Talk description

I want to talk about Death.

If there is one thing that has caused fear in every living creature from dawn of history to present day is death. Fear and pain are the basis for our self-preservation instincts but accepting our own mortality is so hard that we've created a whole set of "immortality systems" -national identities, art, religion, work and social structures- to delude ourselves (cf. Ernest Becker) and forget we're mortal.

However, as technology reshapes every corner of human relationships, the very concept of what it means to be dead is transformed too. The uncanny valley of afterlife will be soon paved by venture capital, with promises of online executors for your digital legacy, content creation to please your social audience in the hereafter and bots trained to mimic you for eternity (or at least until the startup's buyout/exit).

Are these eerie interactions bound to be creepy? Can they be tuned and provide therapeutic effects? Are our digital memories a faithful representation of ourselves? What kind of relationships could be built on top of these identities?

It's a difficult conversation for which I don't have all the answers, but I've many questions I'd love to share with you.

Learning objectives

• The current status of digital legacies and some possible evolution paths.
• The effects of software and digital identities on the concept of Death.
• The long-term implications of digital clones.

That's an interesting topic. I think there's some aspects of death you passed over in your summary: digital archeology and digital history. If we look through the legacy left behind by great minds of the past century, there's a great deal of correspondence, sketches, scribbles and drafts that give some insight on the personal life and work of historical figures. We are able to look at Leonardo's Da Vinci's sketchbooks, read the letters sent by Hernán Cortés to Charles V, and appreciate Dijkstra's accounts of attending boring conferences in godforsaken places.

If we were to discover a box with Gutenberg's personal correspondence, it would surely be put up for auction at Christies. We would have no qualms about privacy concerns, as the historical importance would surely override them.

This begs the question: at what point Steve Jobs' personal inbox will be auctioned? Will Tim Berners-Lee's harddrive will be explored by archeologists of the future? Will Ellon Musk's Facebook account be browsed by researchers? How do we prevent digital legacies being wiped out in today's volatile startup ecosystem?

Hi Mark,

Thank you very much for your comment.

That's an interesting topic. I think there's some aspects of death you passed over in your summary: digital archeology and digital history.

True. That is mainly because I'll be covering those topics in Krakow in April http://mmconf.com with this talk: https://gist.github.com/aitor/4444619

If we look through the legacy left behind by great minds of the past century, there's a great deal of correspondence, sketches, scribbles and drafts that give some insight on the personal life and work of historical figures. We are able to look at Leonardo's Da Vinci's sketchbooks, read the letters sent by Hernán Cortés to Charles V, and appreciate Dijkstra's accounts of attending boring conferences in godforsaken places.

Yes and no.

The resilience and perdurability of all those records has been of course demonstrated but their scarcity (specially before the printing press although you mention only past century) is equally obvious. Records on the infancy and puberty -in general all that happened before they became famous- of some of biggest names in History are often too rare. Additionally different approaches to the concept of "privacy" through History, made personal lives another usual black hole in biographies. And it just get more problematic when the person is not an A-Level character or/and you go back in history.

One of the areas I want to look into in my talk is how mobile devices, voluntary quantified self and life-logging will impact these historical records for the big names as much as for every person and the possible effects of this abundance and granularity. At the same time, is important to consider the context of the records (e.g. is a tweet as genuine as a personal letter sent in the XIX century?) to assess the validity of the profiles we can create with them.

If we were to discover a box with Gutenberg's personal correspondence, it would surely be put up for auction at Christies. We would have no qualms about privacy concerns, as the historical importance would surely override them. This begs the question: at what point Steve Jobs' personal inbox will be auctioned? Will Tim Berners-Lee's harddrive will be explored by archeologists of the future? Will Ellon Musk's Facebook account be browsed by researchers?

Very good questions too. As stated before the concept of privacy has changed multiple times, but the metric of 'historical importance' is likely to remain valid pretext in 500 years.There is another question predating this one: Will it be even possible? Will the facebook content or other "cloud" properties (amazon, flickr, etc) be inherited and therefore available to future generations without audited by the data-holding companies? (most usual answer right now is no).

How do we prevent digital legacies being wiped out in today's volatile startup ecosystem?

Finally I think this question can be generalized into: How do we ensure digital information survival in the long-term? Short lived startups is one of the menaces of course, but there are more angles: media longevity, format support, legal framework and value, required infrastructure...

Thank you very, very much for your comment Mark!

There are a few talks on SXSW Interactive that you can dig up in this topic that could expand your proposal. I could not find one that I listened to where some archivists tried to collect all the digital legacy for the 9-11 memorial. It was quite interesting I remember. They talked about accessing the information in multiple source formats. How they had to upgrade or emulate the format in order to retrieve an the side effects of it. Much like the brain, accessing the content modifies it. They also talked about how open source is great for archiving things.

I also see another angle missing here. Do digital natives actually care about preserving this content? I personally try to control as much as possible my digital presence but I know that is not true for younger generations. They leave traces all over the place and they do not care about it. Some exploration on generations could add another angle to your thesis.

There are a few talks on SXSW Interactive that you can dig up in this topic that could expand your proposal. I could not find one that I listened to where some archivists tried to collect all the digital legacy for the 9-11 memorial. It was quite interesting I remember.

This http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/all-the-names is the closest thing I can recall, but it's related to the memorial itself and not that much to the memories of the people.

They talked about accessing the information in multiple source formats. How they had to upgrade or emulate the format in order to retrieve an the side effects of it. Much like the brain, accessing the content modifies it. They also talked about how open source is great for archiving things.

Agreed. Open source code and formats are key to achieve longterm accessibility… but one could argue that even that could be not enough to save our knowledge and memories in some scenarios. What if for examples, some kind of sudden disaster destroy our short term ability to process digital information (lack of reliable electricity in big quantities, impossibility to run current manufacturing installations, etc.)?

Long Now Foundation has a project called "The Rosetta Project" (http://rosettaproject.org/) where you can find nearly 100,000 pages of material documenting over 2,500 languages and one very interesting part of it is "The Rosetta Disk" (http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/), a nickel disk etched with thousands of pages and readable with simple optical magnification, no hardware or software or even complex tool required. But this, is probably material for another, bigger, more complex discussion XD.

I also see another angle missing here. Do digital natives actually care about preserving this content? I personally try to control as much as possible my digital presence but I know that is not true for younger generations. They leave traces all over the place and they do not care about it. Some exploration on generations could add another angle to your thesis.

Good points. Two quick and possibly too simplistic ideas:

• Is difficult to see historical relevance in the moment it's happening. Imagine Hitler writing a letter to a friend about how frustrated he felt after his failed attempt to gain entry into the Vienna Academy of Art. The friend reads the letter -maybe even write back- and dispose it, because you know… is not that important (Adolf will get better for sure and get accepted next year). Many historians have argued that event was key for Hitler's personality development and for subsequent World History. But it was, at that moment, just a letter.
• Our needs and desires change with age. The person that feels embarrassed by those unfortunate, sexually-loaded instagrams now, is the same -at least from a biological point of view- that was proud to be portrayed as "very active" during puberty… but you can find the same metamorphosis happening in every generation through history. Anyway, it's true that there is a very clear change on the concept of privacy -not unique, as many have occurred to date but important nonetheless- and current teenagers are the first generation radically exposed to this life-sharing trend in a digital environment.

Thank you very much for your comments Marce!