{"id":2883,"date":"2011-01-09T15:52:49","date_gmt":"2011-01-09T23:52:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=2883"},"modified":"2016-11-07T16:09:33","modified_gmt":"2016-11-08T00:09:33","slug":"digital-immortality-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2011\/01\/09\/digital-immortality-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital Immortality Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, cool, I got a passing mention in the Sunday New York Times Magazine <\/em>today in an article by Rob Walker, \u201cCyberspace When You\u2019re Dead<\/a>,\u201d\u009d about various kinds of digital immortality.<\/p>\n


\n[The illos in today\u2019s post, for reasons which will become clear, are my photos used to illustrate a story by Mac Tonnies, \u201cOne Hundred Years<\/a>\u201d\u009d which appeared in issue #3 of my online zine, Flurb<\/a>. Some of the photos are from other stories in the same issue #3. By the way, I\u2019d love to know the name of the artist who painted the wonderful street mural shown above.]<\/em><\/p>\n

As regular readers will know, I\u2019ve written about themes of software immortality in several contexts. To start with, the four novels in my Ware Tetralogy <\/a><\/em> deal with the notion of copying someone\u2019s mind to another platform. The collection is available in print, as a commercial ebook, and as a free CC ebook.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I coined the word \u201clifebox\u201d\u009d in a short story, \u201cSoft Death,\u201d\u009d which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction<\/em> in September, 1986. I used it to mean a digital or online simulacrum of a person. I go into considerable detail about the lifebox in my novel, Saucer Wisdom<\/a><\/em>, in my non-fiction book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul<\/a>, <\/em>and in my 2009 article \u201cLifebox Immortality<\/a>\u201d\u009d which I co-authored with Leon Marvell. This article has also appeared in a recent issue of h+ magazine<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In a nutshell, my idea is this: to create a virtual self, all I need to do is to (1) Place a very large amount of text online in the form of articles, books, and blog posts, (2) Provide a search box for accessing this data base, and (3) Provide a nice user interface.<\/p>\n

I made a first crude stab at this a month ago, with my Rudy\u2019s Lifebox <\/a>page. This page lets you Google-search my rather large www.rudyrucker.com site.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The \u201ctest subject zero\u201d\u009d discussed in today\u2019s Times magazine article is Mac Tonnies, who died this year. I was one of Mac\u2019s numerous online friends—you can find the exact extent of this by typing \u201cMac Tonnies\u201d\u009d into the Search box on the Rudy\u2019s Lifebox page mentioned above. Most of the hits are to posts which have comments by Mac at the bottom. And, as mentioned in the caption to first illo on today’s post, I published one of Mac’s stories in my webzine.<\/p>\n

As the Times article discusses, some friends of Mac\u2019s have kept his Posthuman Blues <\/a>blog alive as a kind of lifebox. Note the slightly ominous final post, although Mac liked these kinds of images, so really they aren\u2019t all that ominous in the context of his blog.<\/p>\n

The Times article is a harbinger of a trend I\u2019ve been predicting for some time: there\u2019s going to be a small industry based on people building digital memory-shrines for themselves. The Nokia phone company had an early entry into this sweepstakes with their Lifeblog <\/a>package, but that\u2019s gone now, so far as I know. More recently, I noticed that Hallmark Cards is getting into \u201cmemory-keeping products.\u201d\u009d<\/a> And everyone\u2019s heard of Microsoft\u2019s Gordon Bell and his MyLifeBits <\/a>project.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Some of the links in the Times article are for companies like Entrustet <\/a>that serve as digital repositories for your \u201clifebox\u201d\u009d data such as online photos or collections of your writings. At this point, some of these services are primarily about cloud-based data-storage, with an immortality spin. These services are expensive, though, and often involve a monthly fee\u2014which you\u2019re likely to stop paying a few years before you die. If you’re interested in pursuing a lifebox plan of your own, here’s a 2016 overview <\/a> by a group called Cloudwards, comparing the various cloud-based storage services such as Carbonite.<\/p>\n

Another company, Deathswitch<\/a>, will send post-mortem messages to people from you! How do they know when to send the messages? When you stop answering their emails and\/or, presumably, when paying the bills they send you. It\u2019s easy to imagine some tragicomic scenarios here\u2014a guy writes angry \u201cAren\u2019t you sorry now\u201d\u009d messages, forgets about it, lets the account lapse. Actually, the idea for the company is grounded on a short-short story \u201cA Brief History of Death Switches<\/a>\u201d\u009d by the company founder David Eagleman.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Back to digital immortality. One way to create a lifebox is, like Gordon Bell, just to save everything you type and photograph everything you see. Another way is to become a writer and to craft a memoir. People in search of shortcuts will turn to companies who purport to help them. A couple of links from entrants into this sweepstakes: LifeNaut<\/a> and Virtual Eternity<\/a>. This exercise quickly turns kind of creepy, veering into the Uncanny Valley.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Clearly what\u2019s needed is some solid shareware to layer onto something resembling Google Search. I wrote a little about this in my post on \u201cChatbots<\/a>,\u201d\u009d and in the comments on the post.<\/p>\n

Actually, as the years go by, this whole enterprise of digital immortality seems less important to me than it used to. By now I’m kind of okay with passing away. And, with or without high tech, I’ll be leaving some printed books behind and, even closer to my heart, my children and grandchildren. That oldschool wetware immortality…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, cool, I got a passing mention in the Sunday New York Times Magazine today in an article by Rob Walker, \u201cCyberspace When You\u2019re Dead,\u201d\u009d about various kinds of digital immortality. [The illos in today\u2019s post, for reasons which will become clear, are my photos used to illustrate a story by Mac Tonnies, \u201cOne Hundred […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2883"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7181,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2883\/revisions\/7181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}