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A review by oldmansimms
We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World by Brian Michael Murphy
3.0
A solid exploration of a niche subject. Murphy charts the history of various schemes to preserve data, from the optimistic (time capsules meant to be opened by our genetically perfect descendants in the year 8113 A.D.; the Voyager Records) to the mundane (ways to protect books from air pollution in early-industrial cities; the ever-growing digital archives of random crap held by modern companies) to the weird (gas chambers for killing bookworms; a performance artist's microscale etching of images onto a satellite in "graveyard orbit" around the Earth).
It's often interesting but rarely revelatory, and Murphy does sometimes lose the plot a little bit - for instance, spending a huge amount of time discussing American contests about who could be "the most typical American family" and all the racial, economic, and patriarchal stereotypes that entails; this is presumably to provide context for the weird eugenically-utopian beliefs held by some of the organizers of the long-scale time capsules he talks about, but it didn't really feel on-topic. Also, I was disappointed in the extremely cursory mention of the topic of how to warn future (indeed, very-far-future) humans about the dangers of nuclear waste storage sites. I've learned a little about that on my own outside of this book, and it's a fascinating subject (prone to outside-the-box ideas like bioluminescent cats) that fits the "End of the World" subtitle of this book to a T, so it's a shame not to include it here.
Thanks to NetGalley and University of North Carolina Press for the ARC.
It's often interesting but rarely revelatory, and Murphy does sometimes lose the plot a little bit - for instance, spending a huge amount of time discussing American contests about who could be "the most typical American family" and all the racial, economic, and patriarchal stereotypes that entails; this is presumably to provide context for the weird eugenically-utopian beliefs held by some of the organizers of the long-scale time capsules he talks about, but it didn't really feel on-topic. Also, I was disappointed in the extremely cursory mention of the topic of how to warn future (indeed, very-far-future) humans about the dangers of nuclear waste storage sites. I've learned a little about that on my own outside of this book, and it's a fascinating subject (prone to outside-the-box ideas like bioluminescent cats) that fits the "End of the World" subtitle of this book to a T, so it's a shame not to include it here.
Thanks to NetGalley and University of North Carolina Press for the ARC.