years ago i was applying for phds in america and had to take the GRE, and the closest testing centre to me was in london. my brother lived there at the time, so i crashed at his place, took the test in the morning, then had a whole day to kill until we could meet for dinner. so i went to the british museum.
i had a really great day and saw a ton of really cool stuff, but the thing that has stuck in my mind over the years was this massive egyptian stele. it was like hundreds of others in the museum – a slab of stone as thick as my head, carved with beautiful hieroglyphs proclaiming the heroic deeds of some long-dead pharaoh. but this stele was displayed laid on the floor, most of the text obliterated by a gigantic hole bored through the middle of the stone.
the little card beside it explained that it had been recovered from a small village somewhere along the nile, where the locals had been using it as a millstone to grind their grain for centuries before british archaeologists moved it here. i stared at the stone and tried to wrap my head around how this could happen. how could someone look at something so full of history and meaning and use it to the point of destruction for something so mundane? how could they so carelessly destroy such beautiful things? how could they have had no thought for the long-term preservation of their culture?
when you start learning things about history and archaeology past the basics, you run into the problem that artefacts and sources dont survive equally. for example, we find lots of flint tools from the neolithic, but not much else. things like clothes slowly decay over millennia, and the organic components of compound tools – the wooden handle the axehead is attached to and the resin glue that binds them together – all decay too. we're left with only the stone, only fragments, trying to understand the whole.
then as you go deeper, you find there's another layer. societies only expend effort to preserve things they thought were important, and only some people get to decide whats important. this is why weve found so many temples and tombs but so few homes, why museums are filled with funerary steles proclaiming the deeds of kings but not the daily diaries of farmers, why youve seen so many hieroglyphs but so little demotic. the elites of a society are the ones concerned with preserving their legacy – extending their power into the future – but everyday people are too busy with the burden and joy of existing to worry about that.
but now, it's different. people today have the ability to document and record their daily lives easily and in so many ways – facebook posts of every night out in uni, instagram pictures of a walk in the park, tweets about your day in work. unlike those in the past, we wont be forgotten. future generations will see how our daily lives were, and theyll understand us. we will leave proof that we were here.
you ever tried looking at a website from twenty years ago?
sometimes the person who made it stored all the media on their own server, so all the content on the site itself works. sometimes they've embedded images or files from elsewhere and those servers have changed their URLs or died, and you get nothing but text and vacant images. sometimes they're too small, the entire page squished up in the top-left corner of your screen because the creator didnt anticipate anyone viewing it at resolutions higher than 800x600, or maybe they just didn't know much about HTML and placed everything using pixel counts from the top-left.
and those are only the ones that survived, because theyre simple. a handful of self-contained HTML files and jpegs stored on a cobwebbed corner of a server somewhere. once you start talking about things like social media networks, you add layers and layers of APIs, interfaces, servers, clouds, content delivery networks, and all kinds of infrastructure, each one with a chain of dependencies upon dependencies upon dependencies. and if a single dependency fails, the entire stack collapses.
we're inscribing the records of our daily lives on clay tablets that crumble into dust if they're allowed to dry out.
when you start learning things about history and archaeology past the basics, you run into the problem where artefacts and sources dont survive equally. we find lots of simple websites from the 1990s and 2000s, but not much else. codebases and dependencies slowly decay over years, and the complex components of simple websites – the CDN that stores the image and the web crawler that indexes the site – all decay too. we're left with only the isolated HTML, only fragments, trying to understand the whole.
then as you go deeper, you find there's another layer. societies only expend effort to preserve things they thought were important, and only some people get to decide whats important. this is why weve found so many pictures of beaches but so few of offices, why archives are full of articles about billionaires but not factory workers, why youve seen so many websites in english but so few in basque. the elites of a society are the ones concerned with preserving their legacy – extending their power into the future – but everyday people are too busy with the burden and joy of existing to worry about that.
and really all that stuff about recording your life is bullshit, isnt it? youre not leaving evidence and documents behind about your daily life to help future historians understand us. your instagram posts of tropical beaches are doing exactly the same thing as a king engraving his victories into stone. youre sending a message to the people who you think matter, sculpting an image of yourself for their consumption, because you want them to love you or fear you or envy you.
the real parts of life, the burden and joy of existing, dont get documented. you will never make an anthropologist a thousand years from now understand how it felt to be crushed beneath the heel of capitalism, and how you defiantly extracted every last drop of joy you could from a life designed to make you a miserable slave. when they dig up the bones of you and your lover, holding each other in death like you did in life, they will not know that you watched stupid tv shows together because you liked making fun of how bad they were.
today, we demolish old buildings because we need the space for new ones, then grind down the rubble to make concrete to build them with. sometime in the future, someone like me will go to a museum and see a model of the ugliest brutalist building you can imagine and have the same thought i did. how could someone look at something so full of history and meaning and use it to the point of destruction for something so mundane? how could they so carelessly destroy such beautiful things? how could they have had no thought for the long-term preservation of their culture?
we have a tendency to think weve learnt the lessons of history, that its different this time, but it isnt and never will be. stone inscriptions weather away, writing on parchment disintegrates, and harddrives melt. you and i will be forgotten in time, like every peasant, every slave, every tribesman, every hunter-gatherer before us.
but i cant stop thinking about that stele, laying on its back in the british museum.
those egyptian peasants left their mark, didnt they? if it hadnt been for the hole they had ground through that slab of stone, if i had seen nothing but yet another record of a dead pharaoh's proclamations, i wouldn't even have thought of them. they werent trying to preserve anything, they werent trying to leave a legacy. and yet here i am, writing about them.
years later i went to CERN for a conference and took a day off before my flight home to go be a tourist in geneva. in the old town, i ducked out of the rain into a cathedral and the signs written in english explained its history. it had been a place of worship of some kind for nearly two thousand years – the romans had built a temple here when they conquered the helvetii, then it was turned into a church centuries later when the locals converted to christianity. the wooden building had been rebuilt in stone sometime in the third century, and the modern building rested on its foundations. the basement was a museum, letting you walk around the excavated roman foundations beneath the church, and i paid for one of those electronic guide headphone things to walk me around the building, since all the signs were in french.
in one corner, in a place that didn't matter, i saw one of the stone blocks that made up the foundations was rough. the rest of them had been ground smooth thousands of years ago, but this one still bore chiselmarks. you could see each strike. when i touched the stone, i could almost see him. some mason who wasnt being paid enough to care. "this stone's going in the foundation anyway. no one will see it."
ive never felt such a strong connection to someone so far away.
karl marx once said
the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living
and like stone, that nightmare erodes and accretes. rock erodes into pebbles, pebbles into gravel, gravel into dust. dust accretes on the ocean floor and settles, layers upon layers, compressing gradually into rock.
but every so often, something survives – some ancient creature trapped in the sediment, or the footprint of someone long gone who was just passing through. while the rest is ground into dust, fragments survive. and the people who come after us will take the fragments that, by pure chance, happened to survive, and fill in the gaps with their own stories, the same way we weave stories between flint arrowheads, potsherds and inscriptions.
sometime in the future, someone like me will find something i left behind. maybe it will be something i threw away because it wasnt useful anymore. maybe itll be something i lost and missed greatly. maybe itll be something i expended great effort to make. maybe itll be something i halfarsed to get it over with. theyll pick it up, and maybe theyll be able to see me, the way that i saw that roman mason, the way that i saw those egyptian villagers.
"hello. i was here."
