It makes me wonder how long all of our online presences will remain after we're gone. Personal blogs/websites will go down and large companies like GitHub & social media will yield to newer competitors. Archive.org is probably the longest living publicly available archive of these profiles but who knows how long that will exist for either. Like countless other human lives, at some point there will be no evidence left that we were even here at all. "All those [profiles] will be lost in time, like tears in rain."
A person dies twice. The first time is when they die. The second time is when the last person who remembers them dies.
It also seems, that the best way to be remembered is either to write or to win battles. On the other hand, building long lasting monuments (like some contemporary billionaires) seems to be quite inefficient when it comes to remembrance of a person, historically speaking. The only exception I can think of is the Eiffel-Tower, dude made a wise decision naming it after himself.
Irvin D. Yalom - Staring at the Sun (2011)
> I have let go of the wish, the hope, that I myself, my image, will persist in any tangible form. Certainly there will come a time when the last living person who has ever known me dies. Decades ago, I read in Alan Sharp’s novel A Green Tree in Gedde a description of a country cemetery with two sections: the “remembered dead” and the “truly dead.” The graves of the remembered dead are tended and adorned with flowers, whereas the graves of the truly dead were forgotten; they were flowerless, weed infested, with tombstones askew and eroded.
Alan Sharpe - A Green Tree in Gedde (1965)
But when at last the threads of memory rot and the
rememberers themselves are tombed, then the liberated
dead move in silent flit to the old open field of the truly
buried, and there in sight of the living they relax and at last
rest.
Who will believe my verse in time to come
If it were filled with your most high deserts?
Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life and shows not half your parts.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say “This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.”
So should my papers, yellowed with their age,
Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be termed a poet’s rage
And stretchèd meter of an antique song.
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice—in it and in my rhyme.More seriously, it's a theme as old as mankind. For example, Ugo Foscolo in "Dei sepolcri" (1806):
"Non vive ei forse anche sotterra, quando
Gli sarà muta l’armonia del giorno,
Se può destarla con soavi cure
Nella mente de’ suoi
[...]
Sol chi non lascia eredità d'affetti
Poca gioia ha dell’urna; e se pur mira
Dopo l’esequie, errar vede il suo spirto
Fra ’l compianto de’ templi Acherontei,
O ricovrarsi sotto le grandi ale
Del perdono d’lddio: ma la sua polve
Lascia alle ortiche di deserta gleba
Ove nè donna innamorata preghi,
Nè passeggier solingo oda il sospiro
Che dal tumulo a noi manda Natura"
It'll be great. Too bad I won't be around for it.
I'd love to see updates from my friends who passed, even if I know it's all theater by a secret impersonator.
The tricky part being the agency. How to continue and persist itself. Survive the demise of servers and hosting providers.
Maybe I should have a second one and not let them know about each other
gem 'sdoc', require: false
And yeah, so much is whatever.
But man, we each carry a little light. And these records, these pasts, they - to me - mean something. Code commits or comments; they are some kind of testament
I forget what it was but yesterday I think there was a nice submission where the author was saying even lack of evidence or failing is evidence. They were saying that just because theirnefforts didn't pan out as expected, doesn't mean they aren't informative pieces. Letting time in, letting us figure out long terms what values & lessons there are... I think that respectful & aweful ability to regard each other without moving to ill judgement is enormous.
When people are gone it just becomes so obvious how much the world loses from that active actor trailing off.
I joined a company in 2001 and left in 2010. A tool and library I wrote for debugging 3d geometry is still in active use.
In 2010 at a new company, I wrote another tool for visualizing a complicated tree structure. It has thousands of daily active users in the company.
My two biggest legacies are tools to help developers visualize their data. I'm pretty proud of that. Even if I don't get to maintain either piece of software, I'm glad to know they helped and continue to help.
https://www.softwareheritage.org/
ArchiveTeam saves things to archive.org too:
A lot of people seek some kind of immortality through reproduction, but this is good enough for me!
Personally, if I leave nothing in my wake (as far as practicality allows) when I die I will be very happy. Leaving behind a legacy only inconveniences whoever it is who has to pick up the reins and clean up after me.
To be sure we should try to take care of the loose ends if we can before we die — not knowing when that is means we should probably keep a tight ship as regularly as we can - especially more so as we get older. This thought crosses my mind fairly regularly when I look across the garage, in the storage room at all the crap I've accumulated. (Nevertheless, if the kids just want to toss everything, have an estate sale that's cool.)
Just leave things better than when you found them. Not for you, and not for those who follow, but for the thing itself. I suppose in this framing people are things too - help them to be better versions of themselves if you can. Other than that, have fun and enjoy the ride.
But.
I am reminded that, over sufficiently long time scales, no one is remembered. There is no such thing as "legacy", really. As somebody pointed out once: how many people are remembered now from even, say, the last 2500 years? Alexander the Great, and, uh... maybe a handful more. But will even Alexander the Great, or Napoleon, or Genghis Khan, or Albert Einstein, or Ramanujan, or Marie Curie, or $INSERT_CELEBRITY_HERE be remembered in another 2000 years? 10,000? 100,000? 2 million? 10 million? It seems likely (assuming the human race even persists that long) that we're all forgotten in the end.
So I dunno. I still go back and forth in my own mind about whether or not "legacy" is even worth caring about or not.
If you're not a replicant, it's never to late to create habits to increment your TTL counter. :)
I'm not trying to diminish the importance of our online lives while we live. It is a big part of our lives. But after we are gone... different story.
Accounts like my shitposting twitter account and HN accounts - who cares. But I don't want to be another lost soul last seen online years ago after suddenly disappearing. I have too many people like that who I still think about.
I know this is a bit paranoic but its the best i can do. Also most of my passwords are on a kpdb file so with the master credentials someone could get all the access to everything (that would go to my VERY close family for example)
So that means if your server got hacked today, the hacker would have access to everything? Put differently, what I'm asking is: How exactly are you managing your credentials?
That's really the only mechanism we have to reliability transmit information post death yeah?
I say that, not knowing the now deceased blogger and if he was in some way connected to this community or to tech?
But we've had over two decades of people dying on blogs and social media and it's exploded now in some sort of weird graph with age and usage increasing online.
Being so common at this stage it's a fair question, was this person one of our own?
Or what in particular about this situation is interesting?
Don't be one of those folks who tell comedians to stick to jokes.
I hope Zandar's dad fixes this for you
But during all of this browsing I never visited the front-page. When I did, I saw the announcement about his death. Turns out he died a month before I found his blog. So far that has been the most tragic death of a person I don't know personally, just because it was so abrupt and eerie.
RIP Jon, and Shamus.
I haven't read his blog in years but to find out he's gone is crushing.
[1] https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=54513 [2] https://www.patreon.com/posts/finally-news-85529959
Also a reminder to not write down your passwords if you don’t want your family members to be able to access your devices.
Perhaps just have one device for family photos, and one device for Japanese tentacle porn.
I guess I should compile a list of email addresses that my sister should have access to.
Many years ago, I was part of an online community and some guy died who had been mistreated and banned and they were like "We shall reinstate his account and do this other thing to memorialize him" and I just felt like "Wow, this guy was supposedly your friend. You couldn't have been nicer to him while he was still alive?"
In that case, he committed suicide. I couldn't help but feel like he could have still been alive if they had been nice while he still drew breath and it just infuriated me.