Passdown Project
Exploring how we "pass down" things to our children and grandchildren in an increasingly digital world
Passdown Project
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
Community archives sites locally in nodes
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
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
Benjamin’s library was a personal monument, the same kind that we all construct of things we like or identify with. Its importance was dependent on permanence — collections are made up of things that we own, that don’t go away unless we decide they should. “Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects,” Benjamin wrote.... See more
Kyle Chayka • Essay: The digital death of collecting - by Kyle Chayka - Kyle Chayka Industries
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