We shall all die and we shall all be forgotten. And if our works have not been captured on tablets of stone or our images as cave paintings then the “forgetting” will not take very long. While stone tablets and cave walls have a life of tens of thousands of years, the life of parchment is at most about two thousand and paper is unlikely to survive more than a thousand years. Media for the storage of electronic data can live for probably no more than a few decades – at best. And with the internet the medium is getting ever more ephemeral.
History does not change. But the historical record depends on who recorded it and with how much bias, on what medium and who rewrote it before the medium died. Data corruption and plagiarism were not of great concern in the days of stone tablets. The ease of corrupting data has increased with the ease of recording data and the lifetime of the recording media have decreased.
David Mitchell writes in The Observer:
These days thousands are campaigning for “the right to die” and “the right to be forgotten“ as if they’re genuinely worried it might otherwise not happen.
What will our descendants think of it? “Bloody hell, those guys were a bit glass-half-empty! What else did they want? ‘The right to self-harm’? ‘The right to feel humiliated’? ‘The right to decompose’? ‘The right to have someone you hate turn up at your funeral and claim you liked them’?” Historians of future ages could be forgiven for concluding that this whole era was clinically depressed. ………
The only thing I ever liked about the internet was that I thought it would help historians – that, assuming there wasn’t an all-data-destroying power surge, millions of searchable written sources would be left to posterity. Without that, it’s all just grooming and bookshop closures and mind-blowing opportunities for fraud. So this news that Ozymandias can apply to have records of his works suppressed in case they invoke too much despair in the Mighty – ie prospective employers – is a real blow.
You may say that Ozymandias is dead – or rather fictional but, even in the fiction, dead – so couldn’t apply to have his virtual trunkless legs buried in the unsearchable sand (I will retain control of this metaphor). The internet can still be accurate about the deceased, you might think. I don’t. They’re the very people you can say anything about, true or false, because they cannot be libelled. Only the living have legal recourse to ensure accuracy, but why would anyone bother to get things corrected if they can effectively just delete anything written about them that they’re not keen on?
People’s right to suppress unpleasant lies which are publicly told is being extended to unpleasant truths – until they die when it’s suddenly open season on slander. The internet will become constructed entirely of two different sorts of untruth: contemporaneous unalloyed praise and posthumous defamatory hearsay.
We are 7 billion today and all the humans who ever lived (as Anatomically Modern Humans since about 200,000 years ago) probably number around 110 billion. Being forgotten is is the norm.
I want the “right” to be remembered – but not for those things I don’t want to be remembered for! But I will be long gone, long forgotten, and will have little interest in any “rights” by then.
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