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re: Digital Immortality
Robert — (archived)

The key to everything is the nature of digital data, whether it's a book or the data making up the Zone. Digital data can be infinitely copied with no degradation--the zero-or-one encoding is unambiguous, and errors in transcription can be detected and corrected.

Digital media has a lifetime--about a decade for commercial CDROMs and DVDs, twice or more for specially-prepared archival materials. But because perfect transcription is possible, the data itself can be immortal as long as the data is regularly copied to new media.

Whether the data is actually faithfully copied is a social and legal problem, and "Estates that require the propagation and sustaining of computer files" is one feasible idea. Another is to put the data into the care of a legal entity set up for the purpose. For example, The HabitableZone could be incorporated as a nonprofit, empowered to purchase services such as Web hosting and data backup, and to collect membership dues to pay for it, as a vehicle to let the community and its data together exist independently of any particular person.

I would expect some radical and fundamental consequences of digital immortality that would be grist for sci-fi. Up until now, every civilization has limped along suffering from partial amnesia, about the details of its own history, and even more so about the history of the cultures that preceded it. "Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it" is so generally true in part simply because we're perpetually ignorant of history.

But starting about now, it's reasonable to suppose that, barring total catastrophic collapse of our entire civilization, humanity will never again forget even the most trivial details of its past. It's all recorded in high definition in a form that doesn't degrade and is easily copied and backed-up.

Instead of squinting at faded and eroded cave paintings to try and learn about life in prehistoric times, somebody in the future can play an episode of The Simpson in all its original splendor and learn a lot about late 20th Century American culture. Or select an episode of the Daily Show to correlate that day's news with attitudes about the news as reflected in humor--what is and isn't chosen as the topic of humor is significant. Those may be trivial examples, but a more meaningful example is the notion of a continuous record of online conversations stretching back hundreds of years, allowing future historians to simply go read what people wrote on a given day. Want to know how people felt about the Columbia disaster? Read HabitableZone/Space for February 1, 2003. Want to chart the emotional roller coaster post 9/11: Follow the conversations on Current Events forward through the years. Instead of reconstructing the issues in past elections from buttons and flyers and bumper stickers, read what ordinary people debated among themselves. And on and on and on...

It wouldn't make good sci-fi if the outcome is purely positive and civilization marches bravely into the future armed with certain knowledge of the past. You need a fly in the ointment....a potential risk is that digital data is of such perfect fidelity that you can't detect alterations without special independent checksums and signatures that certify the data. Imagine a supervirus that goes out and edits all that digital data to construct a fictional past for an entire society. 1984 without the clunky typewriters and pneumatic tubes and armies of drones with razor blades and glue pots.

Imagine that the virus spreads so fast that instead of the gradual erosion of reality that Orwell described, you wake up in the morning to a completely rewritten past? The usual sci-fi cliche is that only one person knows that reality has changed, but what if everybody knows but nobody can do anything about it? Let's say the virus was unleashed by a hacker/terrorist, rewriting history to reflect an ideology, and it worked, and there's no chance of restoring the records. What would be the effect on the society if everybody's recollections disagreed with all the records? I'd bet that over time the records would win, and much later historians would conclude that all the writings from that time denying the reality of the records just signified a period of mass hysteria.

There's some sci-fi in addressing the social institutions required to preserve all that data. Asimov wrote a few stories about an Atomic Priesthood that guarded the "piles" and the waste dumps down through the millenia, through collapse and dark ages. Maybe a Digital Priesthood would arise, like the generations of monks in the Dark Ages who transcribed the manuscripts down through the years.

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