Passdown Project
Exploring how we "pass down" things to our children and grandchildren in an increasingly digital world
Passdown Project
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
Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars: on Responsible Applications of Generative AI in the Digital Afterlife Industry - Philosophy & Technology
Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińskalink.springer.com
We’re gardeners, and we don’t want these traditions to die off. Our kids are the seedlings. I’m doing the programming for the young people: We put a lot of energy and care into teaching our students the values and traditions of our community, and making them accessible. The work is a constant dance of responding to what the community needs now.... See more
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
Charlie Warzel • Confessions of an Information Hoarder
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.comWe 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
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... See more
Bami Oke • Life in Fifteen Gigabytes - Journal #146
