Broken Record

Think Tank #21

What is the future going to look like, now that there is a record of everything?

It’s scary stuff. Something dumb you posted on the internet when you were sixteen can come back to haunt you thirty years later. Every text message you send, every picture you take exists somewhere, and can be accessed years from now, if need be.

The sheer size of the data pool doesn’t even offer any consolation. Even if that incriminating text message you wish you never sent gets lost in a near-infinite supply of data, we’re rapidly developing AI technology that can find it, should anyone ever care enough to look.

What I find interesting is imagining what this means for history. There will be a permanent record of every newspaper article, every headline, every blog post that’s ever existed. The resources available to today’s historians are very limited, comparatively.

Will history become more ‘accurate’ as a result?

I don’t know. We’re also in a strange time in which the information that is presented to us is so varied and so unreliable that it’s nearly impossible to tell what, if any, is true. Imagine how much more complicated it will be for historians of the future to sift through this stuff.

Maybe these two realities will cancel each other out. Maybe, in terms of historical accuracy, nothing will really change. The new pool of information will be so unreliable and so vast that it will basically be like it never existed, and historians will do what they’ve always done: immortalize the ‘mainstream’ narrative in the history books.

Some things never change.