Though the Old World has been scoured by archaeologists, they’re always turning up new things. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the last of the seven ancient wonders, no longer survives, but the workshop where it was built was recently uncovered.
I’m surprised that remnants of the ancient wonders have persisted for millennia, and I’m encouraged, because if brute stone can survive, surely a digitized person can survive, as well. We should all be able to float down the eons in a Pharaonic funeral boat, immortal in a way that the ancient Egyptians could never dream of.
Perhaps I’m in an elegiac mood these days, but I wonder what would prompt people to build a digital version of themselves. Could I build a digital monument to myself, a digital Mausoleum of Halicarnassus? Would it be something that merely baffles my friends and family, or would it live on as a testament to a madman’s desire for immortality, as mad as the Pyramids or a forty-foot-tall silver statue of Zeus?
Could a version of my digital self become a companion for people in the future, a confidante, someone they could talk to? Could my digital self gradually learn from itself or others and subtly reprogram itself in the same ways that I myself might? Will there be a place where digital personas can congregate together, some digital mortuary grounds or Second Life where they can talk about who they once were or argue about ideas?
I’m not sure. But I’ve got the mad Pyramid-architect desire to try and find out, to see what happens, one way or the other. A digital self, if it can avoid bit rot, is a kind of immortality. It’s the oldest dream of them all, the Faustian dream of living long enough to know and observe everything. Except that there’s no devil in this Faustian pact—or at least, no devil that I’m aware of yet.
In the telling of the story, the devil granted Faust all the knowledge he wanted, with the catch that his soul would one day be claimed by the devil. The knowledge was limited only by death, which of course explains the motivation for Faust to cheat the devil and live on. Sadly, in both Christopher Marlowe’s and Johann Goethe’s versions of the story, Faust inevitably dies.
His tale is ultimately a moral one, the message being that we can’t live forever. We can’t come to know everything. And that’s fine. I know I won’t live forever. My body and mind are frail, just like yours, like everyone’s. But that’s okay. Because surely through my digital self, I’ll live on—right?
And this, in fact, is the final digital frontier. The digitization of memories and minds themselves. It might take a hundred years before the heirs of Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs figure out how to digitize human brains and make them available for purchase and download. But once that happens, it would be an amazing experience to download the personality of your deceased grandmother and to speak to her for a few hours. Or perhaps you could have a conversation with yourself as you once were. Or speak with any of the great minds of history and have a dialogue with them or argue with them.
For example, I’m reading a classic sci-fi book now called Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick, and I’m stunned at how good it is. If I could download the author’s personality and start talking to him about his book, I’d feel overjoyed. The closest I can come now is to talk to other readers or post to the dead author’s Facebook fan page, but it’s clearly not the same as a genuine conversation with the author.
Of course, in all likelihood, the minds of wealthy entertainers or technology early adopters will be digitized first. Theirs will be the minds available a hundred years from now as public domain recordings for people to download for free. And while theirs will be the first minds to be digitized, the quality will be poor, like that of wax cylinders or early ebooks.
Though created with the best that technology could once offer, they’ll eventually be seen as grainy, more lo-fi than other hi-fi brains available for download later in the future, so they’ll be relegated to public domain archives that hardly anyone ever visits, the equivalent of the Department of Special Collections at the University of California. And who knows, maybe Jeff Bezos will convert one of his data centers into a building to house his digital brain. Heck, if I had the money, I would do this too.
You don’t have to take my word for this; you can read any contemporary sci-fi book to see the same insights and impulses toward living digitally in a disembodied way. Because these ideas are now part of our culture’s currency. But for now, you and I are as analog as it gets. We get hangnails and wrinkles on our feet. We drink entirely too much beer and suffer entirely too much of a hangover the next day. It’s all part of being analog, and there’s nothing wrong with it. In fact, I like it—wisdom lines, headaches, and all.
Perhaps I only like it because I have no choice in the matter, and I choose to look the other way when I suffer stubbed toes or pimples in ungainly places like the insides of my ears. Or perhaps I like living in the analog mode because of all the great feelings I can experience, what cognitive scientists call “felt states”—the sun on my skin, the taste of a fresh blueberry, or the wonderful, fresh smell of a spring morning. I’m as happily analog as I can get, and I will be for a long while.
And though I may be embodied in an analog form, I can still read great digital ebooks.
Those who read this in the future may sometimes forget that books weren’t always digital. They may look back upon us with disdain because we don’t have brain implants to post live Twitter updates. They may look down upon us because we have sex with one another instead of using electronic Orgasmatrons. They may frown upon us with the face of history because we’re no more than apes who type software and emails with fingers of skin and bone, because we’re pitiful creatures who wrap rags around our frail bodies as we walk to and from work.
I can only plead with those in the future who read this to remember that if not for us, there would be no digital books today, and the future would be less rich and nuanced. If not for us, future readers wouldn’t be floating as brains in an etheric vat, surrounded by digital books and videos and music as they sample from all of human culture like it’s one vast buffet for the mind. Those who read this years from now, please don’t forget that the future wasn’t always digital and that books weren’t always electronic.
Because without the ebook revolution, the future could never have happened.
The ebook revolution is the story of a small group of people who set out to change the way the world reads. I mentioned before how I found it at once eerie and amazing to be in a meeting with Jeff Bezos, scrutinizing the number of lines that should appear on an ebook’s page, because it was the same kind of thinking Gutenberg used more than five hundred years earlier. And like Gutenberg’s team, this small group of people at Amazon worked their way up from square one to reinvent reading. And we succeeded. Reading has not only been transformed but also rebooted.
But this success came with a cost. There were unintended consequences of this success, which meant that many ebook features had to be shelved at Amazon. It became important for Amazon and other device makers to keep up with their competition, which meant that certain innovative features were deprioritized so that resources could be spent on the arms race of keeping up with competitors. These ebook features will eventually be built; I’m not worried about that.
Amazon launched the ebook revolution, but now, the future of books is being tended to by people outside Amazon’s walled garden. By innovative publishers or venture-capital-funded startups or iconoclastic propeller-heads. Innovation is out in the world now. It’s out of the hands of Amazon and other technology giants. I believe the smaller, more nimble, more purpose-driven groups will succeed in building these features out. And of course, as always, the readers ultimately win.