I've often joked about Digital Archaeology[1] to my kids, told them they'd have to get a masters degree in it to review all the digital cruft I will leave behind. I thought this was all good and fun until she passed, and wading through all this stuff just tears at me. This trail of floppies, some I couldn't recover all of, some blank but I could see files that were deleted in hex dumps of the raw images. It was all very surreal like looking at old photographs of our life together but much more visceral for some reason. It’s like digital items don’t have dust on them, they look exactly like they did when you made them 30 years ago. You don’t boot an old floppy and see a fuzzy or yellowed and crinkled screen. It’s perfect in every detail, like the second it was last booted.
Logging into her MMO account and seeing the toons she was playing when the cancer started to take over her brain just killed me. I knew how much she loved these games both of us were gamers over the years and she loved to level to the end game and join guilds, run raids.. To be the center of attention in her online world. We deleted the toons, figured it was the closest thing to reality, she was gone now her digital form was gone, nobody would login and play those characters ever again and no need to make others wonder where she was. She had a large list on-line social network outside of Facebook, guilds in all sorts of games where she was a central figure. Her passing is known to us and those who where on Facebook, but out there somewhere is someone who she touched who’s wondering why she’s not logged into the game for a couple months.
How strange “Death” is in a digital age, sure our minds might stop working and our bodies no longer function but the perfect lines we drew in the digital sand continue on forever.. Or at least until a floppy finally gives up that final bit, or a hard disk somewhere crashes. As our digital world evolves into a place where bits really can live forever these thin digital lines left behind will remain forever etched in the digital world.
I often wonder what will happen to the petabyte that will be my digital impact when I go, will some AI some day in the future consume it in a matter of minutes and derive anything of value? Or will it just sit silently being copied from one storage medium to another forever without anyone thinking about why and what is in it?
Many years ago a customer of mine did a storage assessment and they realized it was cheaper to buy more disks then to ask all their employees to delete unused files.
I knew then the digital lines would go on forever, being copied from one storage system to another because it’s just cheaper to keep it...