Passdown Project
Exploring how we "pass down" things to our children and grandchildren in an increasingly digital world
Passdown Project
Building a collection on the internet is like building a sandcastle on the beach: eventually the tide washes in and it’s as if it never existed in the first place.
Kyle Chayka • Essay: The digital death of collecting - by Kyle Chayka - Kyle Chayka Industries
By continuing to pursue these lines of thought, we develop new ways of framing our interactions with the dead online, and may find pathways for breaking our calcified archival imaginaries and reimagine new ways of living with the data bodies we construct, inhabit, and inherit.
Sarah Wambold & Rem Moore: Only Loss
Successful hoarders, though, tend to share one commonality: the information they distribute is collated, with rigor, and often tied to an organized movement for radical action. This methodology separates the “collection” from the endless stream of “content” we see today. It removes all distractions from the hacker class’s chief aim: the production... See more
Bami Oke • Life in Fifteen Gigabytes - Journal #146
6/ To add a bit more color:
- the last major innovation in history and how we experienced it was Wikipedia, which was a landmark
- LLMs and AI now offer a new modality to store information and make it experiential
- even then, the methods by which we collect primary data for history, and how... See more
Alexandr Wangx.com
In the mid-1990s, Dr. Marshall Duke and Dr. Robyn Fivush developed a measure called “Do You Know?” It had a series of 20 questions, including: Do you know where your grandparents grew up? Do you know where your mom and dad went to high school? Do you know where your parents met? Do you know an illness or something terrible that happened in your family? Do you know the story of your birth? It turned out that having the answers to these questions was the single best predictor of children’s emotional health and happiness. Children who know more about their families tend to do better when they face challenges, be more resilient, and moderate the effects of stress. Our family’s story—our history—is linked to our own personal identity and knowing that we belong to a larger family. “Children who have the most self-confidence have . . . a strong 'intergenerational self.’ They know they belong to something bigger than themselves,” said Dr. Duke…
Similarly, I was foolish and didn’t upload my high-school, college, and pre-2013 photos, most of them digital, to the cloud. Thanks to a damaged hard drive and a lost computer, most of these photos are gone, creating a massive hole in my life. What does it mean that my digital likeness, save for some Facebook photos, begins so late? Are the... See more