You wake up. Get out of bed. Drag a comb across your head.
Sorry, this is 2024.
You wake up. Grab your phone. And you immediately start creating records of your quotidian existence, starting with pings off a cell-phone tower, entries on authentication logs, Google search strings, texts, Instagram hearts, TikTok likes, maybe even a selfie, though you should probably have listened to Sgt. Pepper and combed your hair first.
Eventually you manage to go to work, and your location is tracked and recorded the entire time. Google keeps track of all the YouTube videos you watch “for work.” Lunch at the deli goes on your credit card statement.
You get the picture. Everywhere you go, everything you do, you’re generating biographical data. Reams and reams of it.
Pity your poor descendants, why don’t you? Can you imagine? They sign in to Ancestry.com on their brain implant, pop in your dimly-remembered name (by thinking real, real hard about it), and out come 5.63 x 107 hints. Now your great-great-grandchild can trace every dreary, tedious minute of your life from age 14 to your untimely death at 243. That is not a recipe for an enduring love of genealogical research. Your descendants will build no shrines to you and your caramel macchiato habit. There’s no mystery. You’re the opposite of mysterious. You are intimately known and deeply boring.
How do we remedy this? You could do the whole check-out-of-modern-life thing, but of the complexities, sacrifices, and personal fortune required for that sort of drastic decision, the less said the better (because I don’t know what I’m talking about). You could request and/or demand that all the companies holding your personal records delete them. And you should do that, to the degree practicable. But that’s only going to get you so far.
Most of these records, again—if you’re endeavoring to participate in modern life1—are out of your hands. But some, well, they’re in your hand right now. Stop taking pictures, turn off your location tracking. Blow the dust off your 2002 Rand McNally road atlas. Spare your descendants the headache. Or even better, give them a mystery to solve. Burn the records, change your name, move to the other side of the globe and start a new family. It’s your only shot at being a sexy mystery scroll instead of a four billion page open book.
Let’s go back to the future for a more optimistic take.
Instead of logging in to Ancestry.com, my descendant is going to tell her personalized AI/domestic partner to please—honey—”write me a 120-page biography of my great-great-grandfather, the late, lamented Genealogian, who only recently died at the untimely age of 452.” Perhaps she’ll pass out bound copies at my funeral.2
Then the AI will sift through the 5.63 x 107 records of my vain life and spit out an engaging and readable précis, drawn from all of those sources, but spinning only the golden threads into a very tasteful whole. It will use its practiced and discerning eye to grab a few of the greatest, most representative photographs, leaving the rest for the enthusiast. It will decide on the turning points of my story, then use the mess of data tracking my every move to retell those events in carefully-selected, compelling detail.3
Then they read it at my funeral, and there’s not a dry eye in the house.
That’s kind of cool, isn’t it? Don’t fool yourself that your whereabouts on February 4, 1994 will be of any interest to anyone but yourself (and you will be dead). But with a powerful enough review and summary system—something that suddenly belongs to our very near future—the records could make a lovely narrative.
Think of it. An entire bookcase in your house dedicated to the biographies of the ancestors. Of course, the farther back you go, the slimmer the volumes. All the way back to little scraps of paper the size of fortune cookie fortunes: “Elizabeth (—————); fl[ourished] 1413; d., prob., bef. 1424.”
Do note, however, what your descendant is not doing. Your descendant is not doing genealogy. When biographical data becomes cheap, there will be no genealogy. Genealogy is data mining. It’s like Bitcoin. To release the little morsel—the datum—you need to put in the work. And the more that’s been mined, the more work you need to put in for that incremental datum. When we all luxuriate/drown in a pool of near-infinite data, the miners are out of work.
You may be tempted to pity poor Elizabeth and her mere scrap of life. Staunch your tears, dear boy. She’s one of the lucky ones. Remembered, but just barely. Something to pursue. An elusive quarry. One more record of her could double or triple our knowledge. And it would give the miner who dug it up a real rush.
Save the pity for yourself. And knock it off with the selfies.
In Soviet Russia (and everywhere else), modern life participates in you.
How come the bad future is in the second-person but the good future is in the first-person? Doesn’t seem fair, does it?
It will glance at this post, decide it’s a little too on-the-nose, and leave it out.