The Ghosts We Leave Behind

There are a Thousand Copies of You

One of my good friends, Dannel Jurado, recently did an excellent piece in Tiny Cartridge about Pokemon X / Y’s ability to store Pokemon in a cloud service rooted somewhere on the Internet. Additionally, through some circuitous methods, you’ll be able to transfer Pokemon in from 3 generations ago into the most recent release. Jurado goes on to muse about how this indicates that we, as a society, are beginning to form attachments to data in the same way we form attachments to old photographs or worn books — we’ll be able to play a brand-new Pokemon game with hand-raised creatures that will be older than some of the children playing the games to begin with.

However, the difference between forming an attachment to a first-edition print of Old Man and the Sea and your 10-year-old Roselia is that the book was printed in a moment in time and, when changing hands, continues to be the same book. Data on the other hand, when transferred from computer to computer, is actually recreated bit-for-bit, creating a perfect (or near-perfect) copy of your digital friend. In essence, the data preserved the results of the choices you made — like what you named your Pokemon — but lacks the soul of the original creature.

Archived data — genetically perfect as they are — are merely ghosts that represent the choices we’ve made up until a certain point of capture, just as how ghosts are supposedly an exact bit-for-bit transfer of a human at their point of death,missing only the soul of their existence — the journey they traveled to get to level 100.

As humans begin the world-wide metamorphosis into a data-driven race, our days are full to the brim with digital interactions: cameras, microphones, engine microchips, personal computers, cellphones, pacemakers, insulin pumps — all of these things sense us and record what they observe. Even with an exercise band on, you record data that will exist somewhere for your entire natural life. It’s natural that, as the data that describes you is automatically archived, a ghost of yourself is stored in a constellation of numbers somewhere deep in Amazon’s Web Storage.

For people who grew up around the Internet, entire stages of their lives are preserved in living color. In ages past, people were remembered for the sum of their parts and the legacy they left behind, seen in the faces and stories of others — now, a person is being recorded at every stage of awkwardness, every stage of political alignment and every stage of weird, experimental haircuts. Just looking at your Facebook profile is enough to demonstrate both to yourself and to anybody else conjuring up data who you were then and what you stood for. It’s not even too little data to form an absurd caricature — a mixture of photos, notes, status updates, videos and comments can form a pretty complete picture of who you were back then.

So, for those raised by the Internet and described by data, there are thousands of you. There are copies of you when you were into your radical stance on Tibet or during your infatuation with Communist China. There are complete carbon-copies of your felt fedora phase and at least a dozen backups of that hare-brained post you put on Twitter and deleted in a few seconds. Data spiders watch every move people make on social media, and a few tools even make that data available. That post you put on Reddit with the unfortunate typo? Believe me, somebody has every comment you’ve made and deleted.

We’ve continuously been hounded by news stories about journalists and civilians uncovering complicated posting histories from spree killers or nee’r-do-wells that either show them prior to their unstable state or in the midst of it. Who hasn’t been at least a little bit taken aback by the idea that they could have called up the feelings on these villains at any time? Recorded forever is the anger and the loneliness of the killer and the apathy of the people he reached out to, etched into stone for the world to see.

Knowing this, perhaps the most harrowing thought of all is that, while in the older days a ghost could be exorcised and sent to slumber, billions of digital ghosts being born right now are going to haunt us forever, only to die by obscurity. Even your Geocities page from 5th grade (And, if you didn’t make a Geocities page, you made an Angelfire page), while inaccessible due to its obscurity, is only forgotten. Somewhere in the basement of a former Yahoo! engineer, your Brazilian “Mr. T Ate My Balls” fan page rests wearily in a box of dusty magnetic tapes.

MC Frontalot has a great piece about the march of Moore’s Law called “Secrets From The Future,” musing on the absurdity that, given people’s propensity to hide their secrets through uncrackable encryption methods that could eventually be knocked open by a Speak-N-Spell, nobody is going to give a damn about who you once it’s open.

“And future people do not give a damn about your shopping,

your VISA number, SSL, two cherry-popping hot grandpa action

websites you visit, nor password-protected partitions, no matter how illicit. and this it would seem is your saving grace, the amazing haste of people to forget your name, your face. Your licentious list of indefensible indiscretions. In fact, the only way you could pray to make impression on the era ahead is that, instead of being notable, you make the data describing you undecodable.”

Gone are the days of rumors, because in a time when any spirit can called from beyond the grave to reenact their exact lives, the only thing left of us left to mystery is “what happened in the time when he wasn’t on a computer?”