6 Ways the Digital Age Will Troll Posterity
6. The Very Worst Thoughts of Our Time Will be Preserved Forever
Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides wrote a combined 300 or so plays; only 33 survive. A whopping one (barely) of Menander’s supposed 100+ comedies escaped the Middle Ages, when paper was at such a premium that scrubbing old text from existing books became worthwhile. Most of Sappho’s poetry is completely lost, even though she was widely considered by ancient commentators to rank as a titan of Greek poetry alongside the likes of Horace and Pindar. And yet, the Egyptians around the time of Jesus thought roughly enough of her work to use manuscripts of it to stuff dead crocodiles and make papier maché, because they were into that sort of thing.
But not all is lost: every single word of Donald Trump’s campaign speeches is merely a click away, just like his tweets. Just Google ‘Trump speech transcript’. They’re all there, across a multitude of online archives.
And they will be, forever.
The mere fact that he’s POTUS basically guarantees their preservation — they’re now artifacts of top-shelf historical interest, make of that what you may — but it does suggest images of future generations tasked with sorting through a virtual landfill of cultural material, complaining that time, decay and basic neglect hadn’t laid waste to enough of these libraries like they did in the good old days. A classicist or cultural historian will always look at what has survived and want more; will people ultimately want less in the face of overwhelming quantity, right down to every utterance, every garbage tweet?
Think of it as a virtual snapshot of our worst selves for future generations. Oh, and speaking of which…
5. Human Relationships: Expanding Universe Theory of Ideas
This is kind of the ‘expanding universe’ hypothesis of where learning is headed in coming centuries and beyond. You may have a bookcase, and it may be filled with a mix of books you’ve read, books you’re meant to read before you die and books, you admit to yourself, you’ll probably never get around to reading. Also true of any forms of art — music, film & television, plastic arts and literally anything else we consume — but this is probably felt more acutely in literature because of the sheer amount of time it takes to read just one (say) Dickens novel and that every school and community has goddamn warehouses of these things. There’s so much to read and only so much time to read it. It’s literally and literarily time versus tome if you’re even a casual bibliophile.
A challenge facing future generations will be selecting what art to consume, an also what art should be consumed by others, with the pool of works from which to choose binge-multiplying with each passing generation.
Some suggest that this all spells the end of the novel (or that it’s already dead), but long-form writing formats will (needless to say) persist in competing for attention spans alongside Victorian titans and continue to pile on top of them. Sorting out an established curriculum will be a nightmare. Lit departments hashing out what a consensus literary canon should be will be something like trying to field a trans-historical Dream Team after another 800 years of Major League Baseball — everyone’s will look different and the factors influencing their formation will be largely idiosyncratic and arbitrary.
“So what?” you say, “the important thing in education is learning to think critically and not who’s read what,” and “the medium is the message, anyway, tra la la, etc.” And this is a totally fair and valid point, which I happen to use myself from time to time: the role of higher education shouldn’t be only to produce automatons reciting the same Frost verses or research specialists in ludicrously specified fields, but to send thinking, rational, literate and confident beings into the world.
But the ways in which individuals participate in the circulation of ideas and knowledge have to be thought to be dramatically altered by these extremes of proliferation, no?
The very idiom “the medium is the message,” which I placed in your mouth above, silent reader, illustrates both point and counterpoint — it’s a thesis that is itself recognizable and has a generally agreed-upon meaning because it gained wide circulation at some stage. It’s unclear not only how ideas will gain such currency in an ever-expanding landscape of ideas but how it will affect how we relate to another as individuals when everyone’s bookcases, so to speak, cease to bear a resemblance.
We’ve all seen a conversation die on the spot when the topic turns to a movie that one person’s seen and the other hasn’t. Say, you’re at a cocktail party and a group of you are standing around and someone alludes to a Philip K. Dick novel, and you, having not read it and with nothing to add, make a joke about his name, there are some groans, some eyes roll, and all falls silent while you look at your shoes. Are we headed for a world where all social interactions are some variation of this dead air?
Oh well, as long as artists continue to produce, then our body of reference will just be more recent. Except…
4. Possibilities for Originality Will be Suffocated
Ever have that nagging this-has-been-done feeling when trying to create something original? Maybe it’s a song melody you’ve plinked out on the piano keys that reminds you of a tune you can’t quite put your finger on, until later you’re horrified to learn that Billy Joel has taken up residence in your subconscious.
As new media evolve and emerge, so too do the possibilities of using them to protect ideas as private property. Shakespeare’s London had the Stationer’s Register, a crown-operated registry of newly printed works that also functioned as a system of copyright for written material, but still, the perception of a writer’s relationship to his/her material at that time was still pretty fluid, as writers freely borrowed from one another and earlier generations of writers to extents that seem like blatant plagiarism to our sensibilities.
In the digital era, the ease of and relative anonymity surrounding file-sharing may seem to undermine the principles and practise of copyright, but, in reality, the resources really are in place for every feature of digitized culture to be used to prevent intellectual property from being ripped. Just try naming your band, or giving a title to your novel manuscript, using Google to see if that sequence of words exists in any similar function — you’re practically left just mashing together three or more of the most random words you can think of if you want something truly original and now you guys are set to debut your EP as ‘Panic Segment Swimsuit’.
You can’t tweet a stolen joke and expect to get away with it. It’s already possible to search visually similar photos. These are mostly good things. But somebody will also eventually design a definitive algorithm measuring song similarities. This tech will crush plagiarism but could also reduce the creative process to a fruitless hunt for dwindling uncharted territory. And so on.
If two works of art survive intact as storage expanses make way for them, then so too does the possibility of their comparison, and of determining which came first.
Which does give rise to one obvious problem…
3. Storage Technology Will Struggle to Keep Pace With Content
Geologists and such like to point out that, if our planet’s life was represented by a day, then the entirety of human existence would amount to the last three seconds of that day. Following that analogy, the digital era would be the last few milliseconds of that same day. We’re just getting started here.
Future generations will be responsible for preserving and curating all of the things that we produce now and hereafter. And with governments having an increased stake in having access to the posting histories of complete nobodies on social media, the demand for space to store it is there, but is the supply?
2. The Virtual Loss of Work
As processes of preserving digitized cultural material becomes bogged down in legal machinery, one plausible, unwanted consequence is works becoming lost in plain sight. Whether it’s an article disappearing behind a ‘paywall’ or content being simply suppressed out of known existence by the rights-holder — to say nothing of the problematics of archiving— is there any guarantee that future generations will enjoy the kind of sharing that we do now?
We could be entering a centuries-long argument over rights-holding of digital content. And it’s not just about who created what — i.e. about traditional notions of authorship — but also what new rights might arise when a work migrates across different media formats. For instance, when something that originated in an analog format becomes digitized, does it become repackaged with new rights, creating a whole tangled mess of buzzkilling licensing issues?
None of this bodes very well for the quality-versus-quantity ratio, if you’re one who happens to think that commercial value and artistic merit share come correlation. People tend to protect things with (established) value where there interests lie. We pay for Dave Chappelle and George Carlin, but they don’t charge for open mic. It’s why you can’t find a Tarkovsky film on YouTube in its entirety, but I could have a YouTube channel hosting my nine-hour Norse saga animated by marionettes with me clearly sobbing out of frame about what’s going on in my life.
1. You May Never Find Your Car Keys Again
Some academics have (surprise!) called into question the possible deleterious effects of internet culture on our brains, which isn’t just an update on the same arguments that gamers have been hearing for most of their playing lives about how their favorite pursuit rots their minds.
There is the realer issue of what’s known of the brain’s ‘neuroplasticity’ — that is, the brain’s ability to adapt to changes in its environment and how it engages things. The trouble is that now we live increasingly in an environment where, as we well know, much of the heavy lifting that was once accomplished through the exercise of memory function and logic is done instead by a simple internet search or by an app, to the possible extent that our brains are becoming ‘rewired’.
And not rewired toward maximum radness in a way that emulates these technologies, but in the sense that the pathways of thought itself may gradually erode and give way to nothingness, so that as you try to remember a 4-letter word for ‘around the neck of a hanged man’, at every turn you’ll be encountering detour signs.
Again, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the internet is still in its infancy and so it’s early to tell what (if any) are the long term effects of sustained internet usage, and so this could all be alarmist speculation. Several centuries into the future, though, who’s to say you won’t need an app to remind you that you don’t get dressed socks-first?
