Charlie Stross’s notion of Total History
Time to once more break up the shiny with a little social-SF futurism.
Let’s start with something simple, like changes in how we use email.
Remember the early days of web-based email; 5 MB accounts on Hotmail, constantly deleting to make room for the new.
Now think about recent services like Gmail; no need to ever delete, your capacity increments on a daily basis, a continual archive of every email ever sent and received, all filed nicely with labels and such.
Have you thought through the implications of these sorts of changes? Well, let me save you some time, and point you to a recent essay on just that subject, from uber-SF author Charles Stross.
Just start with this morsel from Shaping the future (emphasis mine):
This century we’re going to learn a lesson about what it means to be unable to forget anything. And it’s going to go on, and on. Barring a catastrophic universal collapse of human civilization — which I should note was widely predicted from August 1945 onward, and hasn’t happened yet — we’re going to be laying down memories in diamond that will outlast our bones, and our civilizations, and our languages. Sixty kilograms will handily sum up the total history of the human species, up to the year 2000. From then on … we still don’t need much storage, in bulk or mass terms. There’s no reason not to massively replicate it and ensure that it survives into the deep future.
And with ubiquitous lifelogs, and the internet, and attempts at providing a unified interface to all interesting information — wikipedia, let’s say — we’re going to give future historians a chance to build an annotated, comprehensive history of the entire human race. Charting the relationships and interactions between everyone who’s ever lived since the dawn of history — or at least, the dawn of the new kind of history that is about to be born this century.
Total history — a term I’d like to coin, by analogy to total war — is something we haven’t experienced yet. I’m really not sure what its implications are, but then, I’m one of the odd primitive shadows just visible at one edge of the archive: I expect to live long enough to be lifelogging, but my first forty or fifty years are going to be very poorly documented, mere gigabytes of text and audio to document decades of experience. What I can be fairly sure of is that our descendants’ relationship with their history is going to be very different from our own, because they will be able to see it with a level of depth and clarity that nobody has ever experienced before.
Meet your descendants. They don’t know what it’s like to be involuntarily lost, don’t understand what we mean by the word “privacy”, and will have access (sooner or later) to a historical representation of our species that defies understanding. They live in a world where history has a sharply-drawn start line, and everything they individually do or say will sooner or later be visible to everyone who comes after them, forever. They are incredibly alien to us.
When you have digested that, go back for the full meal.
Total History. Coming soon. Prepare yourselves.
It’s a very weird feeling to be at that liminal edge of this phenomenon. Think about it: We don’t forget people, anymore.
Good or bad, pretty much everyone we’ve ever known is at our fingertips. Just this afternoon, I found the father of a friend to whom I’ve not spoken in over nine years. Took me about 3 minutes.
I’ve remembered everyone I’ve ever known, well, in person, good or bad, in some form or capacity.
If you give me a name, and a last known location or school, I could find that person in a relatively short period of time. More to the point, You could.
Taking it a step at a time: What does it mean for interpersonal relationships that we can no longer truly distance ourselves from our enemies, our heartbreaks, our lost loves, etc.? How does our processing of bad relationships have to change, to deal with this?
I think it makes it a more conscious process. It makes the entire thing something that we have to determine to do, an initiated sequence, over which we exert more control, and which we must necessarily approach in a more reflexive manner. Not forgetting, but transforming the meaning of that relationship; putting it in a different mental category, until it needs to be reorganised, again.
Good or bad? No way to really know, yet.
Not only can you not forget people, but you can’t lose them either.
Simple example: Facebook friend requests.
These are often not people from your Present circle (because they’re all added in the first few days of joining YASNS), but your Historial one.
Some person reaching out across time to touch-base. Maybe in the past we’d have run into them again in another city, but today they’re just a search-term away.
Or less if you join all those Groups.. I went to High School High, worked There, etc.
Now this, I think can more problematic. Because across time we like to evolve, to change bits of our Identity..
And you might not want a reminder that in High School you were in The Chess Club (or rather, you mightn’t want your Current circle to know that)…
True enough, and that was part of what I wanted to say, here, but you expressed it much more clearly. The key thing is, then, that we have to be willing to have that conversation about our identity, about the constructed nature of it, and we have to be more able to look at certain unconscious processes, and make them at least partially conscious.
I don’t want to lose anyone, personally, because I take my identity not as a series of movements from one stage to the next, but a process of culmination and continual assessment and revision.
I’m an archaeology student, and I find it a little troubling that all of this data is being recorded in a way that can’t be retrieved if it were ever buried in the ground.
All it would take is one destruction event, and it would be all gone.
It’s not like clay tablets that can be deciphered even if everybody from that civilization is dead.
As long as there’s cultural continuity, we’re in good shape. But I actually see this revolution as being traceless. That is scary to me.
@Elana – indeed. to gank a comment from Charlie’s post:
see also Sterling’s Dead Media project.
hopefully being mindful of such things will help us build a Future Facing archive of the Present
infinitely recursive immersion… falling into total history and living life from the perspective of everyone
[...] science fiction, Society, storage, technology — Tom Dillon @ 4:05 pm The other day I was directed to the transcript of a speech by Science Fiction Author Charlie Stross, in which he talks about the [...]
My question is how useful will it all be? I mean, part of the problem will be data overload. Right now, finding someone just by their name is difficult bordering on impossible, and as the amount and variety of data that is available grows we will require more and more specific details to find a person.
I think that privacy will not so much disappear as be redefined. Instead of things never being publicly accessible, privacy will be more of a function of “blending into the crowd”. Then again, I could be totally wrong.
@Tom – i think these are all problems we’ll work out solutions for as we evolve along this path
case in point, meta-SNS (or SNS aggregators?) like Socialthing! look very interesting..
– speaking of which, anyone got a spare Socialthing invite? send some to me
@M1k3y – I agree that it is a solvable problem, but at the same time, solving it would require a departure from the current method of solving problems. The reason for this is that “we haven’t seen the same breakthroughs in the theory of algorithmics that we’ve seen in the engineering practicalities of building incrementally faster machines”. Basically, what he is saying is that the way we solve a technical problem at the moment is to throw Moore’s Law at it. Filtering through the the massive amount of raw data that will be created is not a problem that will be easy to solve by throwing clock cycles at it, instead it will be, by definition, a matter of breakthroughs in algorithms. The reason that I am pessimistic about this is that I imagine that the way to generate those breakthroughs is through investments in basic science, which unfortunately, is something that I am just not seeing. Even so, once we get to a point that the bottleneck of progress is our lack of development of algorithms, I am sure that we will start seeing advancement in this area.
By the way, would your name happen to be a reference to Cory Doctorow’s book, Little Brother?
@Tom re: algorithms, i totally agree!
the best candidate we seem to have at the moment is the whole folksonomy, tagging solution. time-stamping is easy, and will make possible searching chronologically. ditto using GPS etc to mark location.
but, given the failure of things like Machine Vision to make real progress in what, 20 years now, auto tagging things based on what you see is going to be a lot harder. (but would be oh so powerful if it became functional)
so yes, recording a massively detailed lifestream is one thing, but being able to make excellent use of it may be a much larger issue.
re: Little Brother.. it’s kinda the other way around.
except i’m not American, wasn’t a Hacker Kid and have never fought the Government or any of it’s Agencies.
@M1k3y – Upon further thought (and some sleep), I have a couple of little things to add. The first is that the reason that it is relatively easy to predict things like progress in storage (Memory Diamond) is because it is a fairly linear progression (a better word might be continuous), whereas things like algorithms are distinctly non-linear. Progress for these comes in spurts that are not necessarily intuitively connected.
Also, I think that part of the problem is that I am thinking of things as they are now. If we totally abandoned the notion of privacy, and started to give everyone a totally unique identifier, then it would be trivial to connect all of the data from one person into a continuum, and once you have one point on a continuum, you can find any other. I don’t think that this would solve the problems of data overload, but it would probably go a long way, if we were willing to sacrifice all aspects of privacy, which is something that is hard to imagine.
re: Little Brother – I just noticed that he changed the main character’s name from M1k3y to w1n5t0n.