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
In recent years, there have been studies that designate digital hoarding as a subtype of psychological hoarding disorder. Much like physical hoarders, the subjects of these studies found it emotionally distressing to discard stored data, citing a fear of wasted potential for future use.
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 we make it discoverable, need to be updated for the mode... See more
The 1000 word Save Wisdom Questions. – SaveWisdom.org
savewisdom.org
How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.
Julian Barnes • The Sense of an Ending
I turned forty earlier this March, and as I enter my forties, I’d like to leave a breadcrumb to revisit when I’m fifty.
These four themes are what I intend to be guiding principles for how I live my life and prioritize my time in my 40s:
the idea of leaving a personal digital 'breadcrumb' for 10 years down the line
Sarah Wambold & Rem Moore: Only Loss
donotresearch.substack.com
Perhaps, in an economy where the sale of information has made certain people very rich, you could argue that we collect these scraps hoping to one day turn passion projects into passive income. Of course, for most this is not the priority. Storing old files is nothing more than an innocent way to relive a pleasant memory. For others, though, the va... See more
Bami Oke • Life in Fifteen Gigabytes - Journal #146
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…