Your life is in accounts that end when you do
Almost everything a person leaves behind now sits inside services that were never designed to outlive them, under terms most people have never read.
- digital estate
- platforms
- access
Blog
Notes on keeping a record of a life: why platforms lose it, which formats survive, and why a simulation of a person is worse than an archive of them.
A terabyte of photos is not a memory
Capture got free and description did not. The result is enormous personal collections that nobody can meaningfully search, read or inherit.
- metadata
- description
- selection
The formats that will still open in 2125
Format obsolescence is the failure mode nobody notices until it has already happened, and the defence is unglamorous, well understood and mostly ignored.
- file formats
- obsolescence
- migration
We are not building a chatbot of your grandmother
Systems that simulate the dead are being sold now. The objection is not that they are eerie — it is that they overwrite the record they were built from.
- griefbots
- simulation
- record integrity
Designing a record that survives its own context
The hardest preservation question is not storage. It is what a record must contain to be understood by someone who shares nothing with the people who made it.
- self-describing archives
- long now
- interstellar