Passdown Project
Exploring how we "pass down" things to our children and grandchildren in an increasingly digital world
Passdown Project
In conversation with friends, I realized that this was a common problem. My best friend’s home screen is a dizzying mass of screenshots, essays, and audio recordings for future reference. My mother’s internet browser regularly crashes because of the fifty-three tabs she keeps open at all times. My partner never deletes a photo without putting it on... 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 we make it discoverable, need to be updated for the mode... See more
We have more public information than ever, but what if there is also less transmission of more personal information between people—especially between generations. What is lost if our digital heirlooms become inaccessible to close relatives? What is lost if estates do not donate prominent people's cloud data to university archives?
Charlie Warzel • Confessions of an Information Hoarder
Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars: on Responsible Applications of Generative AI in the Digital Afterlife Industry - Philosophy & Technology
Tomasz Hollaneklink.springer.com
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
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
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