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The Dead Speak

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If you're reading this, most likely I am dead. In fact, if all of my plans come together exactly as I want them to, by the time you read this in all likelihood I'll be a minute speck on the ocean of human events.

Let me assure you that this is not a sophisticated suicide note.

Perhaps I should phrase this differently.

As I write this, I do so knowing that you are dead. Sure you may feel alive, and why not? And you and I can continue our conversation here on this blog -- my posturing, your questioning. If you have questions or comments, you can post them here. I'll certainly reply to comments I think have merit. But I know, really know in my heart -- you're dead.

I've been blogging here for over three years. During that time, I've created 635 articles. You are reading number 636. Each day, according to my logs, around a thousand unique people show up, mostly looking for interesting images as the result of a google search. Of all of those people, I get about a dozen new comments a week. Since most people wander by randomly, I don't get comments on the new stuff -- it's all over the place. I've received about a thousand comments over the past three years.

Getting out our napkins and pencils, if a thousand people come by each day for three years, that means roughly a million people that have visited my blog in total. Looking at the average mortality rate for the United States for last year, I see that out of a million people, 8,259 people died last year -- mostly from heart disease and cancer.

Looking at this another way, over a three-year period of time the odds that any visitor has died is around 8259/1000000, or .8 percent. Let's say you are reading a comment. The odds of the person writing the comment having died (assuming each person writes one comment) is the same (since there is nothing unusual about comment-writing that predisposes one for death). So out of all of my visitors, around 8 thousand are now dead. Out of all of wonderful commentators I've been privileged to read, 8 are now gone.

Seems like trivial numbers. At least until you put them in perspective.

The internet is not that old -- most blogs are less than ten years old as of this writing. The vast majority of blogs are small fish like this one, and most of the conversation takes place among small social groups. We've had segmented groups talking about things in user groups and BBSes for decades. There's nothing new about people writing online journals and like-minded people chatting.

But the internet never forgets. As time rolls on, the original author of a post will be long forgotten to history, the comments could be spread out over decades, or centuries. Sure, some topics, like Britney Spears' use of underwear or O.J. Simpson's legal problems, will not mean a damn thing to people five hundred years from now. Some things will only interest historians, like how we feel about the current presidential election, or the way we view our increasing lack of personal freedoms.

But heck, there's a lot of stuff people talk about that is timeless: what is the meaning of life? What makes for a fair trade? How should I treat the people I love when they hurt me? Is it better to help one person a lot, or many people a tiny bit? What are the limits to what mankind can know? How does skill and talent play different roles in success?

These topics are timeless. People two thousand years ago were having these conversations, and people two thousand years from now will be continuing them. But there's a difference. With the interactive web, people will be consuming our thoughts on these subjects, and many times replying. Conversations started by one generation will be linked or continued into others. After a hundred years or so, most written material on the net will have been published by dead people. After a thousand years or so, most comments on the net will have been written by those long gone. As the web grows, the percentage of articles and comments by real, live people will diminish to zero.

This may sound depressing, but I don't think it has to be. Technology has given us so many other things; perhaps in the near future, using Bayesian techniques, we'll be able to post articles in such a way that we'll be able to automatically reply to comments long after we're dead. Just like spam programs keep trying harder and harder to look like regular email in order to get past the filters, auto-replying systems will get better and better at exactly imitating what we would have said to the comment had we been alive.

The Dead Speak.

5 Comments

Thanks for your great contribution. It’s really full of information. People really need this types of blog. So keep up this magnificent work.

The mechanism for interactive communication has gotten faster, but overall the process hasn't changed in the last two thousand years. The people who study physics today are continuing conversations that were begun long ago thanks to the printing press, by publishing papers that reply to people who are now long dead.

In fact, I think your entire argument could apply to writing of all forms just as easily as it could apply to the Internet: with people saving their knowledge in a form that didn't rely on people to actively remember and store it, the amount of knowledge in the world created by people who are dead should drastically outstrip the amount of knowledge being created by the people who are actually alive.

However, that argument is based on two hidden, and yet flawed, assumptions.

The first is that writing is in some way fundamentally more permanent than memory: that what we write down will last throughout the ages and be available to all of the people later whom might be interested in finding and responding to it, without being damaged or lost or simply unfindable in a giant pile of unindexed information.

Frankly, from my perspective, (and seriously: this is nothing personal to you), the probability that your website is going to survive for the long haul and that people will be responding to this comment thread two generations from now is nearly zero. I'd actually be quite surprised if your website and all of the comments that are on it are still here in just another ten years.

In fact, in another ten years the entire medium may have changed. The information placed on the Internet just thirty years ago to Usenet has now already mostly been lost, with the information from twenty years ago seemingly being deleted by Google. Websites from the Geocities and AOL era of ten years ago are now a distant memory of archive.org, and that's assuming it got to them at all.

In practice, the things that we are saying here are not /fundamentally/ less transient than they have been in previous eras: it will last for some dwindling amount of time, and unless I say something interesting enough here to cause them to rephrase it, to rework it, to keep it alive for the next generation, this conversation will end. But however I think about it, I doubt that my specific words will be what survives.

The second assumption is that the number of people remain constant. Putting aside for a second the possibility that this entire experiment we call civilization may come crumbling around us in a catastrophic war for water and oil (if nothing else, because that is likely to destroy the Internet and with it the premise of the argument), the number of people on earth is currently doubling every 35 years, a rate that has actually been accelerating (although maybe our counts of people have just been becoming more accurate ;P).

Assuming the amount of information someone can produce is constant (which is a conservative assumption, given that new technology may in fact be allowing us to be more prolific over time), if the population doubles every X years then the amount of work created during any given X years will be equal to one more unit of work than the total amount of work ever created before that time period.

(This is easily demonstrated, in case anyone visiting this site and reading this doesn't believe that, by taking a single person during the first time period creating a single unit of work. During the second time period, two units of work are created, which is one more than during the first. When we get to the third time period we are now creating four units of work, which is one more than one plus two. The pattern works just like the digits of a binary number: adding a number of powers of two together and adding one gets the next power of two.)

Therefore, not only does old conversation tend to decay faster than we'd hope, but it actually would rapidly become swamped by new conversation even if it were perfectly permanent and never rotted or was damaged in any way.

(It also should be pointed out, by the way, that the average mortality rate is heavily dominated by "old people", a demographic that is unlikely to be reading your blog, so in fact the likelihood that many of the people who have read this, or any other, post on your website is much smaller than .8%. You need not be concerned about the massive dead body count associated with your viewership, at least for another couple decades.)

That all said, I will say that I was incredibly happy that I didn't notice that you wrote this over two years ago until I was nearly done typing this comment. ;P That part was certainly epic: I found this article from a link on Hacker News (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2106515).

Jay,

We disagree, but thanks for taking the time to comment. Although given your argument, I'm not sure why it was worth your effort!

I see that you have cross-posted on HN. Also very cool. I appreciate it.

It's interesting that your HN comment was prefixed with something along the lines of "I'm posting this over here, since I think this will survive longer"

Why? Does the Wayback machine care which websites it visits? Does Google cache only cache HN but not my blog?

I do not know if my blog will be around in ten years. It's coming up on five now. Perhaps it will go another five.

If so, maybe lots of other folks will drop by and read our conversation.

By the way, you make an analogy between the web and written text, then debunk your own analogy. The web is interactive, friend. It is dynamic. It is multimedia, and -- best of all -- it is immensely archiveable.

Thanks again for the comment.

Well, without archiving, your website will die soon after you, and all comments will be lost...

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This page contains a single entry by DanielBMarkham published on September 12, 2008 5:26 PM.

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  • DanielBMarkham: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php read more
  • Jean-Philippe (jpleboeuf): Well, without archiving, your website will die soon after you, read more
  • DanielBMarkham: Jay, We disagree, but thanks for taking the time to read more
  • Jay Freeman (saurik): The mechanism for interactive communication has gotten faster, but overall read more
  • adware: Thanks for your great contribution. It’s really full of information. read more

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Recently I created a list of books that hackers recommend to each other -- what are the books super hackers use to help guide them form their own startups and make millions? hn-books might be a site you'd like to check out.
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