To my pleasant surprise, an old school friend commented on my breadcrumbs and Black Swans post. I continue to be amazed by how much digital has allowed us to find and discuss shared interests. The post was around a couple of themes – whether the set of digital breadcrumbs we are leaving now (courtesy everyone being a publisher) will allow generations later to have a better sense of our history, and whether, therefore, our species will be more anti-fragile thanks to this data and the predictive analytics AI can build out of it.
My friend shared an article that talked of Vint Cerf’s warning about us being a ‘forgotten generation’. (I had read the Guardian version earlier) Essentially, his fear is that the lack of guarantee in backward compatibility of software means that documents stored many not be accessible at all. Both led me to Digital Vellum and Project Olive, which aims to establish a robust ecosystem for long-term preservation of software, games, and other executable content.
It made me think a bit. We could obviously store the content itself, but could we really capture what a software, a game or even an image made a human feel? How different is it from recovering a little stone artifact from an excavation site. We analyse it and make educated guesses, and then draw conclusions on what it might have been and how it fit into the life of its users. But we really don’t know and that makes me wonder about the purpose of it all. Maybe the tools we really need are either hard coded in us -DNA – or carried forward through developments in each era as ‘culture‘. Everything else is a minor detail.
In my earlier posts on purpose, legacy is an oft quoted factor. As individuals, we carry the baggage of our past and I once defined legacy as a baggage of our future, affecting not just individuals but even corporations. This entire topic made me think of our ego as a species and as a generation. Our feeling that what we do now is going to be of relevance to something or someone in an age far ahead and we should aim to store it for posterity. Did every generation feel so, or is it something that developed when all of us became publishers? 🙂
P.S. An interesting project in this context is the Millennium Camera – creating a photo that will be seen in 3015 🙂