How We Disappear: Memory, Tech and Small Erosions

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Wagwan, everybody. Welcome to the Dis Afimi History podcast,
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where we'll be speaking about history and as well family history and how history
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relates in terms of Caribbean people,
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for the present as well as in the past and how in the past, what that does and
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brings forth for what we are going through at present and what we can learn
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from our history, from our family and take that moving forward.
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So I do hope you enjoy the podcast. And if you like it, please ensure to subscribe,
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like, and review. Thank you.
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Thank you so much for coming on to the podcast, Professor Mullaney,
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discussing your new book, How We Disappear.
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Now, before we start, I'll just have you just do a brief introduction of yourself,
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and then we'll start right into the questions.
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All right, sure. Well, thank you for inviting me. My name is Tom Mullaney.
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I'm an East Coaster. I'm sort of East Coast born, but I've been out here in
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California teaching at Stanford for, this is my 20th year in the history department.
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I am a historian of modern China and the history of technology and global technology.
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And How We Disappear is, at last count, I think, is my eighth book. But I have two kids.
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My wife's from Italy. My mother-in-law, my nonna, is visiting right now.
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And yeah, I play music. I do various things.
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Oh, wonderful. Wonderful. Thank you so much. And, you know, your book is very
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central to what the theme has been for season nine of this podcast.
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In terms of memory and being able to have that and to be able to express that.
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So what first drew you to the idea of disappearance in the context of information?
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And what is a, I guess, a personal experience or an archival encounter or something
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else? Like, would you be able to explain?
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Yeah, yeah. So there's, you know, there's two timelines to the book.
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And I think this is true of most books, that the book begins with my father's
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death, the book ends with the death of my mother.
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And understandably, people have
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assumed, or some have, that that's what started the process of the book.
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But the book started maybe 24 years ago, when I don't exactly know why,
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but I started to take more and more notice of...
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Let's call them unremarkable ways that things fall apart. So not book burnings.
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And conflagrations and censorship and things, but the sort of leaky, kind of drifty way.
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And I'll give you one example. It wasn't maybe the origin point,
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but it really drove home the points.
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When I first moved out to Stanford, I was living in San Francisco,
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and I was buying Pothio on a credit card.
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Like if I didn't get this job, I don't know what I would have done.
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But I lived in this house with seven other people. It was almost like a co-op
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for young 30-year-olds. And I was 27 at the time, but we're adults.
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We cleaned up after ourselves.
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But there was this patio outside. It's a very tiny patio.
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And there are bicycles there and there are various objects and so forth.
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And one day, sort of the house mom said, well, we're going to clean up.
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We're going to sort of see who belongs to what and what belongs to who.
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And, you know, it was fun. We popped some beers, we went out there,
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we started, like, we had a table, like, claim this.
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Is this your water bottle? Is this your bike? Is this your thing?
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And long story short, I mean, about 30, 40% of it was stuff that belonged to no one in the house.
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But the house over time, it had been like this co-op for many,
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many, many years. People came, people went, people came, people went,
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people came, people went.
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And I thought it was yours and Bob thought it was mine. And,
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you know, Amy thought it was Bob's.
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And it was just this sort of drift of time. And we had no idea who the stuff belonged to.
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It was just, it was there, it was physically there.
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But it had become sort of dislodged from the web of meaning,
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the web of memory, the web of associations.
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And now it might as well have been just a random object in a thrift store somewhere.
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And just little things like that i just became at some point kind of obsessed
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with and i started taking notes and writing things down and that was,
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observations like that were was the beginning of it like what happens if we
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study not dramatic and ultra-violent and you know.
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Singular acts of destruction or disappearance but kind of look at the more you
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know, the more almost like erosion process.
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What happens when we try to inventory all of it and wrap our head around all of it?
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And that was really the beginning of the book.
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Wonderful. And, you know, the book has the subtitle that emphasizes a personal history.
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How did your own life kind of intersect with the larger story you're telling
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about information So this one, I guess, in some senses, this is even earlier than 24 years ago.
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So there's one chapter of the book, it's the beginning, and it's this quote
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that my dad used to say to me.
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A lot. I was like a very emotional kid.
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And so whenever I'd get upset, my dad, who was sort of like a baby boomer dad,
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if you know the type, like sort of, you know, never changed a diaper,
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wasn't really hands-on, sort of thought of parenting as basically,
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mom's work and so forth.
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But his one piece of advice for me as a young child was, you know,
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don't worry, Tommy, pretty soon you won't remember this, like whatever it was
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that bothered you today.
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So, you know, don't sweat it.
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And as a little kid, I, something about that kind of bothered me.
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I remember I distinctly remember, I was like, yeah, I know we're talking about
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something bad right now, dad, but shouldn't the same logic apply?
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Like, I'm not going to remember the real, the feeling of the first time I hit
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a home run in baseball or like the feeling you know,
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the look on the face the girl that i kissed for the first time like it won't
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disapply to everything else as well and he he just stayed,
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again he wasn't necessarily a kind of sit down and talk deep with your son kind
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of dad so he just like left the room at that point so i was i was really it
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it stayed with me this notion of.
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You know, what happens to yesterday? Like, where is yesterday?
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Is it lodged in neurons? Is it embedded in objects? Is it in our muscle memory?
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Like, we know it's somewhere or some portion of it.
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But that, I think, is where the personal part of it really, really started from
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a very young age, I guess.
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Yeah, it's just a different way of kind of, I guess, processing that information.
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And I guess this goes into what you say.
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When you say people or things disappear in systems of information,
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what does that actually look like in practice? I know it's probably similar
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to what you just indicated, but what does that actually look like?
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Yeah, so one example that when it happened to me, I wasn't very happy about
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it because it was like a devastating technological failure, but it makes for
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a great sort of case study. So I'm a musician.
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The thing I've been doing the longest in my life is writing music.
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Pop songs. I've just been doing it my whole life.
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And some people that learn to draw, they have sketchbooks and things.
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And I have cassette recordings and four track recordings. And then I bought
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this mini disc player in Japan that was just like, it was just constantly with
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me and is like an essential part of my life.
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And, you know, you and I was a recording musician, a touring musician.
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So it was also part and parcel to the process of, you know, working on an album.
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And, you know, I was doing my job.
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I was documenting stuff. I was actually naming the files. and you know this
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was this practice this audition you know this uh i was doing what you're supposed
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to do if you want to kind of keep track of this stuff,
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and this one time i loaded all of these mp3s onto i think of an early generation
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of an ipod i can't remember which model and
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i would carry that around with me and i'd sort of play it to remember what a
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song was and then i would and i labeled everything and then,
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that one died or i had to migrate it to like the next generation and it was
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a better ipod it was a better machine more gadgets more bells and whistles.
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And it was a catastrophe, because one of the new features of this new device,
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was that it had an auto-power-saving function.
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So basically, it slips through with your little dial to a particular MP3,
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and then the title of the file would start ticker-taping across the screen.
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Now if it's a pop song like if it's something you know if it's a stacks bolt
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if it's you know if it's tom waits or an otis redding song you know the title
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is pretty short so you can read it but for me it was you know june 26th.
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You know this thing i give a full you know full name of something take two or
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whatever and that was fine in the previous model,
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but now with this new power saving function the screen would go dark before
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the full title went by and here's the other part of it if you like said,
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oh, I'll just tap it to like turn the machine back on,
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it would start the process of giving you the name again.
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And so suddenly this iPod, which had thousands and thousands of files and songs
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in it, all the files were still there. There was no fire. I didn't drop it in,
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you know, drop it in a toilet bowl or something like this.
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But it had become basically this forensic crash site where if I was going to
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recover what these were, I would have had to listen to over a thousand recordings
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and rewrite all of their names.
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And that's an example of an information system collapsing by means that we don't
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often associate with something collapsing. Again, the machine didn't break. No one stole it from me.
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It just got lost inside itself and I was like I don't have 600 spare hours to
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rebuild my life and so I kind of had to kind of move on a little bit,
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So that's the kind of phenomenon that I tried to get at in different ways in the book.
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No, absolutely, because that is definitely something that people can relate
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to and not necessarily align it or classify it or connect it to something as
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disappearing, so to speak.
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Because as you said, it didn't break, per se, but it just is that you're having
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to then reclassify all that information.
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And as well, Professor Mullaney, your work often touches on language and classification.
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How do systems like databases, forms, or as you mentioned before,
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naming conventions, shape who is visible and then who is erased? Yeah.
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There's a colleague I spoke to, and there's so many brilliant people I had a chance to speak with.
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The book is a very short book, so there's 10 more books worth of notes.
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But one story that didn't kind of make its way in because I couldn't quite figure
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out how to pin it down, but still haunts me.
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Is a dancer who I interviewed who has a,
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sort of training in classical ballet and all the terminology and categorization that comes with that.
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So all of this different kind of terminology of the shape of the body,
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the position of the body, the orientation of the body.
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And then sort of, I guess maybe later in her career, she began to work in a
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totally different tradition. I think it was Indian dance. It's a South Asian dance.
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And there are, long story short, there is a posture or a position in.
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One form of dance, that on the face of it, if you were to look at it and just
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describe the shape of the body, is identical to the shape of this and posture
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and position in this other tradition of dance.
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And so if you were to capture it in notation form, it would look as if they
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are one and the same thing.
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But because she's a dancer, she wrote about this, and I'll share this with you
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afterwards, I'll track down the note,
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It's noted that in one tradition, when you are in the posture,
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when you are experiencing the posture, it's as if the energy is like shooting up from the ground.
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While in the other tradition, I believe this one was the sort of classical ballet,
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the energetic kind of style of it was almost like you're hanging from a little,
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like there's like a sort of at the top of the skull, there's something that's
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sort of like, you're supposed to be just sort of gently, you know,
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so the energy is sort of flowing downward.
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So radically different, utterly different kind of energetic orientations.
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But because categorization systems tend not to care about the energy of a situation,
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it cares about what a situation looks like,
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those two things get flattened into a single thing, and a whole phenomenon is lost. And so.
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It's lost, again, not because it was censored or not. It's lost in this.
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In a naming convention in and also a privileging of one way of thinking about
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reality which is i don't really care about i don't believe that energy exists
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i think that reality is just a,
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a bunch of people in different shapes going through an empty cartesian space,
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and another tradition in which you talk about you know the notion of energy
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coming up from the ground and you know, through your body and so forth.
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So, notation systems, by their definition, lose much more than they capture at any given moment.
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And I guess this goes into, you know, that many assume technology is neutral.
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What does your research reveal about how technologies can actively include or
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exclude certain identities?
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Oh, it's just one, you know, how much time do we have?
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So there's, you know, there's, you know, when I teach my course at Stanford
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on introduction to science, technology, society, you know, there are a few.
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Three examples that I bring up in one of the lectures.
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One is the, this is more recent, but it was Nikon, the company Nikon,
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that had, in one generation of its cameras, introduced this new feature called blink detection.
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And this is, you know, for anyone that's ever taken a family photo at Disneyland and...
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You know, everyone is trying to get in posture and then you get home,
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you develop the film and little Billy was blinking and now you can't hang up
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the picture. And so the idea was to solve this problem, right?
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Well, there was a blogger, a YouTuber of Asian descent who documented that every
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single time she took a photograph, the blink detection
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warning light came on because it was trained effectively on the physiology of like,
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Caucasian white male sort of physical structures and so forth.
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And so every single time the algorithm was going haywire.
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Another example, which is actually has the possibility of,
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of if, you know, up to and including physical harm and fatality,
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is well-documented differences in like blood oxygen level, like the at-home
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oximeter measurements, which are always important, but during COVID were super
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important because if the level is a certain way, you got to go to the hospital.
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But because they were basically, the algorithms were trained on light-skinned
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individuals, they would regularly get
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misreadings to anyone at home of African-American, you know, there was,
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so it was a huge discrepancy on this sort of Amazon.com purchase for a blood oximeter level.
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And what I try to talk with my students about is, you know, Nikon is a Japanese company.
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And somehow, a Japanese company produced an algorithm that was sort of systemically
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flagging in a sort of kind of algorithmically racist way.
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There is no way that there was some evil genius, some Montgomery Burns at Nikon
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saying, I really want to lose market share and I want there to be a scandal tomorrow.
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And yet, it made its way somewhere and somehow through these distributed means, things find their ways.
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In addition to all of the, I mean, I think evil exists, in addition to all of
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that, which goes on, there is this whole other story of micro-distributed decisions,
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that lead to these kinds of outcomes.
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And there are just, I mean, I would venture to say that it approaches infinity,
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the number of examples of this.
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Exactly. Not necessarily that
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was done intentionally, but this was one of the outcomes not foreseen.
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Yeah. So, you know, you've done extensive work on Chinese language technologies.
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How does your research on Chinese script help us understand,
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I guess, the broader global information systems?
00:18:29.353 --> 00:18:34.328
Yeah, thank you. So, you know, talk about, talk about exclusion.
00:18:34.665 --> 00:18:39.979
So if we, you know, right now, China is one of the IT, you know,
00:18:39.979 --> 00:18:43.989
juggernauts of the world. And it's, it's the Chinese language is one of the
00:18:43.989 --> 00:18:47.210
most successful languages of the digital age.
00:18:47.900 --> 00:18:51.389
You back up the tape night to not that long ago, 20 years ago,
00:18:51.389 --> 00:18:57.549
30 years ago, all the way back to the dawn of computing.
00:18:57.549 --> 00:19:01.709
And even before that the typewriting and telegraphy the prevailing understanding
00:19:01.709 --> 00:19:06.209
was that if china is going to join the industrial modern age by and at that
00:19:06.209 --> 00:19:10.099
point it was unquestionably that modern meant western as patterned out to say
00:19:10.099 --> 00:19:11.567
western europe and the united states,
00:19:12.277 --> 00:19:19.128
that the price of entry would be severing all ties with its history and culture
00:19:19.458 --> 00:19:22.869
as represented by chinese writing that was the price that was like you know
00:19:22.869 --> 00:19:26.285
the price of entry to get on this on this on this boat.
00:19:29.178 --> 00:19:32.861
And structurally, there was truth to that, because structurally,
00:19:32.861 --> 00:19:39.101
the information age from basically Morse code and electrical telegraphy all
00:19:39.101 --> 00:19:43.611
the way through typewriting and so forth was built by and for speakers of English.
00:19:44.128 --> 00:19:48.231
It wasn't you know again morse did not sit down you know,
00:19:48.891 --> 00:19:52.701
in a in a in a dark shaded room and say i can't i look forward to excluding
00:19:52.701 --> 00:20:00.620
german people and i look forward to it was it was you know we we reproduce what's close at hand and then,
00:20:01.113 --> 00:20:06.021
because then it rode on the back of colonial warships and imperial warships
00:20:06.021 --> 00:20:10.001
and american capitalism and started to spread through the world but it was it
00:20:10.001 --> 00:20:12.226
was always very local at the outset.
00:20:12.585 --> 00:20:18.802
But then this very, very local technology got sort of stretched around the globe
00:20:19.133 --> 00:20:23.071
to, you know, for some writing systems and languages, no big deal.
00:20:23.071 --> 00:20:26.639
You know, French, eh, fine, we have to add some accents and it'll work.
00:20:27.109 --> 00:20:32.151
Russian, different writing system, but the Russian Cyrillic behaves in certain
00:20:32.151 --> 00:20:34.900
ways similar to English and Latin.
00:20:35.277 --> 00:20:38.811
And then things get trickier. You know, Hebrew is right to left,
00:20:38.811 --> 00:20:41.332
Arabic is right to left, and the letters connect.
00:20:41.738 --> 00:20:46.068
And then you have Chinese, which was just kind of beyond the pale.
00:20:46.388 --> 00:20:50.561
It's non-alphabetic. It's a large character set.
00:20:51.397 --> 00:20:57.353
It's not that it was intrinsically or in any essentialist way a problem,
00:20:57.586 --> 00:21:00.471
but now in relation to this information order.
00:21:02.665 --> 00:21:06.056
It was sort of incompatible, was the idea.
00:21:06.847 --> 00:21:11.521
And so most people, including many very, very, very prominent Chinese activists
00:21:11.521 --> 00:21:15.160
and reformers and politicians, also bought into this.
00:21:15.671 --> 00:21:22.097
I followed this sort of ragtag international group of engineers and linguists and scientists.
00:21:22.980 --> 00:21:25.994
Entrepreneurs who said, you know what, I don't accept that.
00:21:27.084 --> 00:21:31.264
There's no way that this is the end of the story. We want the industrial age,
00:21:31.264 --> 00:21:34.525
we want the digital age, but we don't accept these terms of service.
00:21:35.188 --> 00:21:38.054
And they banged their head around it, they banged their head against it.
00:21:38.454 --> 00:21:42.701
It's like failure, failure, failure, failure, failure, failure, meteoric success.
00:21:43.732 --> 00:21:52.934
And to me, what it shows is at any given moment, no matter how universal any
00:21:52.934 --> 00:21:56.649
given order seems, we're,
00:21:58.128 --> 00:22:02.319
we haven't, you know, humanity is a vast, you know,
00:22:02.969 --> 00:22:08.774
however many thousand room mansion, and we're basically over here and still,
00:22:09.422 --> 00:22:13.781
puttering around in like one tiny, you know, one tiny wing of it,
00:22:14.616 --> 00:22:17.014
and And, you know,
00:22:18.594 --> 00:22:19.748
we haven't figured it out yet.
00:22:20.125 --> 00:22:24.894
We really haven't figured out humanity yet. That's my feeling.
00:22:26.741 --> 00:22:29.094
Yeah, we're working on it. We're working on it.
00:22:31.072 --> 00:22:35.083
You know, but would you be able to share a moment where bureaucracy,
00:22:35.368 --> 00:22:40.418
either forums, records, or official systems, made someone kind of,
00:22:40.714 --> 00:22:43.082
quote-unquote, disappear in a meaningful way?
00:22:44.526 --> 00:22:49.752
Bureaucracy does it on a regular basis. So...
00:22:51.309 --> 00:22:57.269
Yeah, I mean, we now we live in an era where everything that we do is is documented.
00:22:57.269 --> 00:23:02.704
And there's, you know, it freaks us out, of course, but we are also unbelievably,
00:23:03.483 --> 00:23:06.769
kind of okay with it compared to human beings.
00:23:07.429 --> 00:23:11.509
It's, you know, 200 years ago before, like people would look at us now and say,
00:23:11.509 --> 00:23:14.039
I can't fathom how you tolerate this.
00:23:14.039 --> 00:23:19.439
But that story really begins, it has deeper roots, but it really,
00:23:19.439 --> 00:23:25.405
really, really takes off in like, you know, the 17 and 1800s when a mixture of,
00:23:26.163 --> 00:23:30.709
unprecedented scale of warfare and whether it's, you know.
00:23:31.993 --> 00:23:35.989
Wars in Western Europe and you have the sort of typing rebellion.
00:23:35.989 --> 00:23:38.949
And its aftermath, you have the American Civil War.
00:23:39.679 --> 00:23:44.899
People just sometimes lose sight of the fact that the American federal government
00:23:44.899 --> 00:23:48.451
before and after the American Civil War is like night and day.
00:23:48.625 --> 00:23:54.289
It's just, and worldwide, the number of men under arms, the size of the bureaucracy,
00:23:54.289 --> 00:24:01.557
the size of the federal government in any state explodes roughly around the same time.
00:24:01.992 --> 00:24:09.898
And one of the things that states do is they're just anxious little machines.
00:24:10.578 --> 00:24:18.714
And they want and need taxation, and they need soldiers, and they worry about...
00:24:19.703 --> 00:24:24.104
Real or perceived tax evaders and criminals.
00:24:25.650 --> 00:24:36.661
And so what that leads to is an explosion in the recording and documenting of
00:24:36.835 --> 00:24:39.005
really the hopes and fears of states.
00:24:39.649 --> 00:24:41.954
So the way I talk about it in the book, and this is, you know,
00:24:41.954 --> 00:24:47.104
I'm standing on, there's no giants in the world, but I'm standing on the shoulders
00:24:47.104 --> 00:24:51.310
of standing on the shoulders of standing on the shoulders of so many.
00:24:51.855 --> 00:24:55.464
But, you know, this is the birth of the passport, and this is the beginning
00:24:55.464 --> 00:24:59.094
of the modern immigration regime that we still live in.
00:24:59.094 --> 00:25:03.104
It's the, so, you know, if you get married, if you buy a house,
00:25:03.104 --> 00:25:06.884
if you cross a border, if you commit a crime, if you're perceived to commit
00:25:06.884 --> 00:25:12.390
a crime, or you're categorized as one that the state believes has a propensity to commit a crime,
00:25:12.901 --> 00:25:17.928
then that produces ink on paper and photographs and things.
00:25:18.276 --> 00:25:24.784
If you daydream about your kid and what they're going to look like when they
00:25:24.784 --> 00:25:27.894
grow up or will they ever get married or have kids of their own,
00:25:27.894 --> 00:25:31.307
if you just do the things that human beings do...
00:25:32.342 --> 00:25:38.344
That stuff is completely irrelevant to the state and now modern corporations
00:25:38.344 --> 00:25:44.974
in some sense, that there's just far, far less likely to leave a trace of those
00:25:44.974 --> 00:25:46.454
aspects of human experience.
00:25:47.153 --> 00:25:53.134
And so there are, you know, it's staggering. So.
00:25:55.174 --> 00:26:01.094
One tiny point. So if you are an historian of marginalized economic classes,
00:26:01.414 --> 00:26:06.174
if you're an historian of women, if you're a historian of marginalized groups.
00:26:08.214 --> 00:26:12.676
One place that historians by definition kind of have to go looking,
00:26:12.920 --> 00:26:16.414
like let's say I'm a modern China historian and I want to study the history
00:26:16.414 --> 00:26:20.563
of laborers or sex workers in Shanghai,
00:26:21.392 --> 00:26:24.515
I will have to go into the law.
00:26:25.494 --> 00:26:30.991
I will have to hope that one of them got arrested and have a transcript of a conversation.
00:26:31.363 --> 00:26:38.394
Because otherwise, their value as human beings, their humanity doesn't register
00:26:38.754 --> 00:26:41.084
for society in many cases, but certainly not the state.
00:26:41.084 --> 00:26:45.340
So you kind of have to, the only way to see them is if they trick the wire of,
00:26:45.782 --> 00:26:49.964
various recording technologies, so to speak. They run a red light,
00:26:49.964 --> 00:26:51.968
so to speak, in the game of life.
00:26:52.386 --> 00:26:55.043
And so it's just a constant change.
00:26:56.407 --> 00:27:00.848
It's a constant disappearance act that's going on. Yeah, I mean,
00:27:00.848 --> 00:27:07.400
many family historians can really relate because, again, they can find an ancestor 20 years apart,
00:27:08.138 --> 00:27:12.878
but they cannot find continuing information about that particular ancestor.
00:27:13.506 --> 00:27:17.908
And I guess my next question is in regards to historians who often work with
00:27:17.908 --> 00:27:19.236
what is, of course, recorded.
00:27:19.497 --> 00:27:24.424
How do you approach what's missing, erased, or, again, never documented?
00:27:26.150 --> 00:27:30.718
You yes so you there's i mean i i would say that,
00:27:31.276 --> 00:27:36.778
there's an absolute long-standing privileging of the of the written word and
00:27:36.778 --> 00:27:39.130
the idea of the authority of the written word and
00:27:39.540 --> 00:27:43.738
which has huge historical and cultural connotations you think of you know classic
00:27:43.738 --> 00:27:48.078
books you know history and the europe and the and the people without history
00:27:48.078 --> 00:27:49.515
that is the the notion that,
00:27:50.020 --> 00:27:53.888
any societies or cultures that do not venerate the written word or choose that
00:27:53.888 --> 00:27:59.098
as the medium of documentation in some sense are understood as not having history.
00:27:59.538 --> 00:28:02.481
And the steady, the steady,
00:28:03.670 --> 00:28:09.835
sort of lowering of status of oral traditions and so forth as unreliable or
00:28:09.835 --> 00:28:11.094
et cetera, mythological.
00:28:11.477 --> 00:28:17.715
So just from the profession of history is already very squarely in the camp
00:28:17.715 --> 00:28:21.133
of that, and there's no way not to inherit that legacy.
00:28:21.783 --> 00:28:28.315
To kind of swim against that, I think that that's when classically historians
00:28:28.315 --> 00:28:31.934
have started this many, many decades ago,
00:28:32.439 --> 00:28:36.185
to look at methodologies that come from other entirely different disciplines,
00:28:36.185 --> 00:28:40.545
whether it be ethnographic methodology or kind of participant observation,
00:28:41.065 --> 00:28:42.917
oral history as a practice.
00:28:43.486 --> 00:28:48.621
Even what sometimes falls into the idea of almost experimental archaeology, where.
00:28:50.431 --> 00:28:58.538
You try to sort of almost insinuate your brain, your mind into thinking,
00:28:59.543 --> 00:29:04.393
Something from the past that you're trying to understand, but you,
00:29:04.393 --> 00:29:09.063
you know, you have no reflections by the person who did it. You have no document,
00:29:09.063 --> 00:29:12.955
there's no third party, but you, but they were a weaver.
00:29:13.619 --> 00:29:17.633
You know, they made books, they made paper, they made baskets,
00:29:17.633 --> 00:29:20.300
they made, you know, so you do that.
00:29:20.619 --> 00:29:24.553
You start to, you, you, you, so I know many historians, I've done this myself,
00:29:24.553 --> 00:29:29.173
who will kind of do a crash course in some particular practice.
00:29:29.173 --> 00:29:33.969
And what's really key about that is, and everyone that I know understands this,
00:29:34.944 --> 00:29:38.943
it's not as if you do it and then you can say something definitive about the
00:29:38.943 --> 00:29:40.893
person because you can't.
00:29:42.253 --> 00:29:46.683
It would be unethical to do that. But what does end up happening,
00:29:46.683 --> 00:29:47.866
and it's pretty magical,
00:29:48.558 --> 00:29:56.140
is just by engaging in the practice that the person you're trying to think alongside,
00:29:56.349 --> 00:29:57.853
you know that they engaged in,
00:29:58.404 --> 00:30:06.296
new questions occur to you that just probably would not have occurred to you in any other form.
00:30:06.868 --> 00:30:12.453
You know you work on a basket for three days and your back is just killing you
00:30:12.453 --> 00:30:17.600
and you start to think like you start to ask questions about the body you start to ask and and,
00:30:18.507 --> 00:30:23.810
ultimately you hope that maybe one of those questions that bubbles up,
00:30:24.623 --> 00:30:31.563
maybe there is some pathway or another by which you you might be able to to
00:30:31.563 --> 00:30:37.527
to to get at that and so there are some historians that are just they are They are the gods of this.
00:30:39.524 --> 00:30:40.888
They are.
00:30:43.296 --> 00:30:46.944
Their minds their minds and I say this with great admiration so every now and
00:30:46.944 --> 00:30:49.284
then in the summer our apartment is,
00:30:50.356 --> 00:30:55.344
you know ants are getting in to get water and you know just the sort of iterative
00:30:55.344 --> 00:31:01.008
distributive like system and just the absolute relentlessness of like,
00:31:01.705 --> 00:31:06.544
you know sending out from the ant hill going in nine different directions eight
00:31:06.544 --> 00:31:11.084
of the nine always failing but maybe one will like find a drop and like communicate
00:31:11.084 --> 00:31:15.630
back to the, you know, we found it, you know, that some historians,
00:31:16.210 --> 00:31:19.104
the ones I admire most, their minds work that way.
00:31:19.104 --> 00:31:23.855
And they just sort of send out their mind in a hundred ways.
00:31:24.105 --> 00:31:26.189
99 do not find water.
00:31:27.308 --> 00:31:32.964
But every time they don't find water, they never ever take it as proof that
00:31:32.964 --> 00:31:35.196
they should stop, that water doesn't exist.
00:31:35.666 --> 00:31:41.111
They just say, I haven't checked the right crack in the right windowsill yet.
00:31:42.557 --> 00:31:47.461
Yeah, those are the historians I admire most. No, no, thank you so much for that.
00:31:47.925 --> 00:31:50.756
And of course, we're going to go present. So in today's digital age,
00:31:50.756 --> 00:31:56.596
social media, AI, big data, are we seeing new forms of disappearance or just
00:31:56.596 --> 00:31:58.758
updated versions of the old patterns?
00:31:59.541 --> 00:32:03.601
Yeah, that's a great question. I think.
00:32:05.048 --> 00:32:10.144
I don't know if it is the same as something that has happened before,
00:32:10.759 --> 00:32:17.836
but i do think that we are it may happen fast enough and that's the speed of
00:32:17.836 --> 00:32:22.387
everything that's going on is something to behold because i it may just as,
00:32:23.106 --> 00:32:30.446
it may possibly happen fast enough that we might witness in my view something
00:32:30.446 --> 00:32:35.906
like what historians would refer to as an epistemic rupture or an epistemic shift.
00:32:35.906 --> 00:32:40.581
So, you know, for any listeners new to that term, you can think of,
00:32:40.983 --> 00:32:44.970
you know, think of college, think of university. So there's chemistry and there's
00:32:45.255 --> 00:32:48.181
philosophy and there's, you know, all these majors and departments.
00:32:49.700 --> 00:32:53.994
Then there is, you know, then there is the foundation of the floor that all
00:32:53.994 --> 00:32:55.324
those buildings live on.
00:32:55.324 --> 00:33:00.674
And then there is the tectonic plate that all of that is sitting on.
00:33:00.674 --> 00:33:06.264
That's an episteme, you know. And so our current, the dominant global episteme
00:33:06.264 --> 00:33:11.374
is, you know, probably a half millennium old or thereabouts.
00:33:11.774 --> 00:33:17.304
And so epistems, they change just like continents drift and crack and so forth,
00:33:17.304 --> 00:33:19.373
but they drift so slowly.
00:33:19.917 --> 00:33:25.274
That pretty much no one in their lifetime ever wakes up one day and says like,
00:33:25.274 --> 00:33:27.908
oh, honey, look out the window. It's a different episteme.
00:33:28.344 --> 00:33:35.614
But there are elements of what's happening right now that it may just happen
00:33:35.614 --> 00:33:39.609
fast enough where we might actually have that feeling.
00:33:39.737 --> 00:33:44.924
And I'll give you one creepy example and then one sort of interesting,
00:33:44.924 --> 00:33:46.201
but maybe creepy example.
00:33:47.013 --> 00:33:55.906
So think about the genre of the movie or of the book or of a song, right?
00:33:56.570 --> 00:34:01.474
So a song and a book and a movie, the one thing that they have in common is
00:34:01.474 --> 00:34:07.268
that they're made and they exist and when we encounter them, we are watching a movie.
00:34:07.437 --> 00:34:09.924
We all will have a million different interpretations of the movie,
00:34:09.924 --> 00:34:14.264
but the movie, frame by frame, is the movie. The Godfather is the Godfather
00:34:14.264 --> 00:34:18.420
from frame one to frame whatever, five million and I don't know.
00:34:19.245 --> 00:34:25.398
God Only Knows by the Beach Boys, you know, from note one to note whatever is one stable thing.
00:34:26.100 --> 00:34:29.275
And then there is art and then there's art criticism and so forth.
00:34:29.959 --> 00:34:36.384
Well, there are people at work right now and it's kind of here where you could
00:34:36.384 --> 00:34:41.145
log into Netflix and I could log into Netflix and you could say,
00:34:41.505 --> 00:34:43.501
I want to watch The Godfather there.
00:34:44.432 --> 00:34:48.050
From Fredo's perspective. And it'll go, boop, boop, boop, boop,
00:34:48.050 --> 00:34:52.910
and it will give you The Godfather from Fredo's perspective.
00:34:52.910 --> 00:34:55.306
You're like following him around the whole story.
00:34:55.856 --> 00:34:59.390
And I might log in and say, I want one where, you know, The Godfather isn't
00:34:59.390 --> 00:35:00.651
shot in that famous scene.
00:35:01.354 --> 00:35:10.288
And it can, and we are, it is conceivable that not just a new set of movies will be made,
00:35:10.887 --> 00:35:16.320
but that this once absolutely unspoken taken for granted i mean who would ever
00:35:16.320 --> 00:35:18.990
define that a movie is a thing that exists.
00:35:20.778 --> 00:35:27.900
Might change in our lifetime where there could be you know a grandchild who
00:35:27.900 --> 00:35:31.511
can't fathom what it meant to watch one movie,
00:35:32.805 --> 00:35:38.230
and that is that's not that that is a form of of it,
00:35:39.095 --> 00:35:45.829
and the and the disappearance there is hard to even tally or calculate, because think about,
00:35:46.351 --> 00:35:52.060
all of the things that we unknowingly stack on top of that unspoken assumption
00:35:52.060 --> 00:35:54.290
of what a song is, what a book is, what a film is.
00:35:54.290 --> 00:35:57.735
There's like a whole house of cards based upon that.
00:35:58.071 --> 00:36:04.836
Well, when episteme shift, houses of cards, you know, collapse. And.
00:36:06.742 --> 00:36:12.313
So there is something that I do think, it's the mixture of the speed,
00:36:12.935 --> 00:36:19.012
but it's also the seemingly voracious appetite that AI companies and researchers
00:36:19.012 --> 00:36:22.880
have to AI everything around us.
00:36:23.114 --> 00:36:24.919
Maybe electrification.
00:36:25.637 --> 00:36:31.932
You know, if someone had lived through the full span of really knowing what
00:36:31.932 --> 00:36:36.842
it was like before the installation of electric light and then kind of living
00:36:36.842 --> 00:36:39.242
a good portion of life in that,
00:36:39.962 --> 00:36:45.282
maybe that's a counterpart, but I'm not even sure that that comes close to what
00:36:45.282 --> 00:36:49.070
we seem to be witnessing, you know, unfolding.
00:36:49.563 --> 00:36:56.032
So, yeah, I do think that it's, It may be of such magnitude that maybe a new
00:36:56.032 --> 00:37:00.542
form of disappearance is coming into being.
00:37:01.026 --> 00:37:06.721
But then again, I've never lived through an epistemic shift before, so I can't understand.
00:37:11.824 --> 00:37:16.282
Theoretically, one side of an epistemic shift and the other side of an epistemic
00:37:16.282 --> 00:37:19.732
rupture no longer speak each other's languages.
00:37:20.508 --> 00:37:22.962
So I don't know if we'll even be able to put it into words.
00:37:24.391 --> 00:37:28.692
And I guess on the other side of that is, you know, are there ways that individuals
00:37:28.692 --> 00:37:35.599
or communities can resist this disappearance or at least reclaim visibility with these systems?
00:37:36.669 --> 00:37:40.367
I think so. I do think, and in the grand scheme of things, no,
00:37:40.367 --> 00:37:43.497
because we're still talking about the second law of thermodynamics.
00:37:43.497 --> 00:37:48.637
We're still talking about heat, death, taking any spirituality out of the picture
00:37:48.637 --> 00:37:49.962
for a second and just talking about,
00:37:52.274 --> 00:37:56.417
given enough time, the earth swallows the sun, that sort of thing.
00:37:56.417 --> 00:37:59.857
But then let's take the clock further. But in terms of the scale that matters
00:37:59.857 --> 00:38:06.599
to us yes and i really think a little bit goes a very very very long way,
00:38:07.284 --> 00:38:13.527
so what what might a little bit be so right now in my family and this is i credit
00:38:13.527 --> 00:38:17.707
my wife with this like i she's much better than i am at this is we'll get to
00:38:17.707 --> 00:38:20.055
the end of a school year and,
00:38:20.728 --> 00:38:23.987
you know i don't know she uses like a file folder but basically think of the
00:38:23.987 --> 00:38:27.157
file folder and it's just like 2026.
00:38:28.105 --> 00:38:29.591
You know boom.
00:38:30.340 --> 00:38:35.187
There's no order inside the file folder and there's no labeling of every sheet
00:38:35.187 --> 00:38:39.317
of paper inside the file folder and of course, like I talk about in the book,
00:38:39.317 --> 00:38:42.175
that stuff can become jostled loose of the file folder, but,
00:38:43.092 --> 00:38:49.439
It vastly increases the chance, like enormously increases the chance that in
00:38:49.439 --> 00:38:54.813
40 years, we'll be able to not just have those drawings that our kids made,
00:38:55.573 --> 00:39:01.739
but have those drawings and have some touch point of time to know that this
00:39:01.739 --> 00:39:07.106
picture came after that picture came before this one. And these happened around the same time.
00:39:07.355 --> 00:39:11.679
From an historian standpoint, that's the coin of the realm. It's really,
00:39:11.679 --> 00:39:17.349
it's less about like absolute times on a calendar than before and after and,
00:39:17.829 --> 00:39:19.204
more or less synchronous.
00:39:19.333 --> 00:39:25.531
That's where the work of figuring out what something may have looked like really comes from.
00:39:26.082 --> 00:39:31.149
And so it doesn't need to be anxious and documenting everything and scanning
00:39:31.149 --> 00:39:36.997
everything and so forth it's little actions foot take one family photograph take it to kinko's.
00:39:38.129 --> 00:39:42.319
Make a color copy of it and then just magic circle everyone's head and put a
00:39:42.319 --> 00:39:49.130
magic marker and be like thomas sean malaney thomas charles malaney dad son,
00:39:49.716 --> 00:39:54.627
just and then tuck that just fold it up tuck it in the photo album And then in 50 years,
00:39:55.387 --> 00:39:58.659
you know, human beings are little pattern recognition machines like,
00:39:58.659 --> 00:40:01.389
oh, you know, that's that's the same person as that person.
00:40:01.389 --> 00:40:05.847
And this looks like a younger version of that guy. And we can piece it together.
00:40:07.008 --> 00:40:13.037
Just that one sheet of paper is missing, it might as well be a random box in
00:40:13.037 --> 00:40:18.083
a thrift store somewhere for all that I know who anyone in the photograph is.
00:40:18.507 --> 00:40:24.837
So I do think there are little ways that we can keep things aloft or,
00:40:24.837 --> 00:40:30.134
you know, a bit longer in ways that matter to us, that we'll really be able to feel. Yeah.
00:40:30.853 --> 00:40:36.106
Definitely, just definitely with the mattering part. And as we come to a close, Professor Maloney,
00:40:36.715 --> 00:40:41.617
you know after reading your book what's one thing you hope people will start
00:40:41.617 --> 00:40:46.706
noticing differently in their everyday interactions with information systems,
00:40:47.520 --> 00:40:51.317
yeah and and let me say thank you again for yeah for being interested in the
00:40:51.317 --> 00:40:56.377
book and for inviting me on i i what i hope and i think if anyone reads the
00:40:56.377 --> 00:41:00.537
book they'll they they'll see this is it sounds like a very heavy book it's you know.
00:41:01.617 --> 00:41:04.817
Disappearance and parents passing and so forth.
00:41:04.817 --> 00:41:11.207
But I do hope that if and when people want to read the book,
00:41:11.207 --> 00:41:15.864
they'll see that there is a kind of optimism or almost...
00:41:16.825 --> 00:41:24.653
I really am in awe now that anything holds together at all like it it is,
00:41:25.526 --> 00:41:30.513
it's not just that the the the story and this is a well document not understood
00:41:30.513 --> 00:41:33.247
the well-documented story and admiration of like,
00:41:33.810 --> 00:41:39.033
the absolute improbability of the existence of life itself in a universe that
00:41:39.033 --> 00:41:45.446
is just really, really allergic to order of most sorts.
00:41:46.084 --> 00:41:50.843
But also just that in our day-to-day life, more often than not,
00:41:50.843 --> 00:41:54.420
if I have a 10 o'clock coffee with someone, I make it. And they make it.
00:41:54.878 --> 00:42:00.897
And the coffee guy makes it. And this fictional thing called dollars and cents make it.
00:42:01.251 --> 00:42:07.403
And I speak a language because someone sang the alphabet song to me like 9 billion
00:42:07.403 --> 00:42:11.884
times and just like we, the number one thing is.
00:42:14.414 --> 00:42:16.625
Whenever you're there,
00:42:19.154 --> 00:42:25.834
on a Monday at 9 a.m. and then at 9.01 a.m., you're still you and the world
00:42:25.834 --> 00:42:31.556
around you is pretty much the same at 9 o'clock as it is at 9.01, that's a miracle.
00:42:32.007 --> 00:42:39.740
That is like, and it's more than, it's a phenomenal, almost incalculable amount of work,
00:42:40.629 --> 00:42:46.394
done at almost every register, the atomic, the molecular, let alone the level
00:42:46.394 --> 00:42:52.614
of organisms and so forth, to make 9 o'clock and 901 be continuous.
00:42:52.614 --> 00:42:58.102
Because there is nothing natural about continuity.
00:42:58.304 --> 00:43:01.148
Continuity is the thing that's weird.
00:43:01.444 --> 00:43:05.653
Discontinuity is the rule. Continuity is special.
00:43:06.291 --> 00:43:12.771
And so one is you know if you forget things if things get lost in family history or history.
00:43:13.876 --> 00:43:17.524
Like give yourself a break reader give ourselves a break it's hard enough to
00:43:17.524 --> 00:43:23.064
get through monday it's hard enough to get through tuesday let alone to reconstruct
00:43:23.064 --> 00:43:25.307
monday from you know 50 years ago,
00:43:26.100 --> 00:43:33.254
but but but do know that getting through monday and remembering monday from
00:43:33.254 --> 00:43:36.394
10 years ago are actually at odds with each other.
00:43:37.454 --> 00:43:42.454
They are. You know, it's like realizing, it's like one of those things where
00:43:42.454 --> 00:43:45.884
you realize that, wow, the thing I need to do for my job, which is sit at my
00:43:45.884 --> 00:43:48.076
desk all day, is really bad for my health.
00:43:48.614 --> 00:43:52.234
So I'm going to have to make a choice to do something that is not so good for
00:43:52.234 --> 00:43:55.348
work in order to continue living and functioning.
00:43:55.615 --> 00:44:01.174
It's a similar thing with life, keeping life information and then keeping history
00:44:01.174 --> 00:44:03.231
information. They do not go together.
00:44:04.431 --> 00:44:08.467
And so, you know, you do, but, but a little bit goes a long way,
00:44:08.467 --> 00:44:10.724
a dash of salt goes a long way.
00:44:11.477 --> 00:44:16.157
And, yeah, those are some home truths that we all need to take.
00:44:17.457 --> 00:44:21.227
But it is, it is definitely true. I mean, if you're trying to recreate something
00:44:21.227 --> 00:44:25.407
from 10, as you said, 50, 100 years ago, that's going to be quite challenging
00:44:25.407 --> 00:44:29.247
to do and, and not to take yourself so seriously about it.
00:44:29.247 --> 00:44:33.187
And we look back at it another time. But no, thank you.
00:44:33.187 --> 00:44:36.867
I really appreciate you. coming on and and having the time and speaking about
00:44:36.867 --> 00:44:41.127
your book because again it gives another perspective of how we need to kind
00:44:41.127 --> 00:44:46.498
of look at things and how we need to approach things as well when we are in this whole thing of,
00:44:46.968 --> 00:44:51.257
keeping or being the keeper of information so no thank you thank you so much
00:44:51.257 --> 00:44:53.325
i really appreciate it thank you so much i appreciate it,
00:44:55.983 --> 00:45:01.157
hoped you enjoyed this episode and if you did please make sure to like follow
00:45:01.157 --> 00:45:07.565
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