Vsauce!
Kevin here.
My image and voice recorded, backed up, uploaded and saved...forever.
Your cat photos, political arguments, the first private message you sent your future
husband or wife, your comments on this video - authenticated, labeled, and recorded.
Somewhere.
For as long as someone is around to keep the lights on.
For the first time in human history.
Ordinary people will never be forgotten.
At least half of what makes you - you.
In Documenting Individual Identity, Jane Caplan explains identity as having two parts.
There’s the subjective you, the “self-same.”
You know who you are because you are you.
You have your memory, which Oscar Wilde called, “...the diary that we all carry about with
us.”
And then there’s the “sameness with another” half of your identity - what others can know.
That includes classifications others assign to you to identify and make sense of you.
And until you can upload your consciousness to BrainTube, this may be the only part of
your identity capable of being recorded.
The categorical checkboxes and evidence you leave behind.
And we’ve been obsessively trying to record ourselves long before selfie sticks.
The oldest way to archive yourself is to pass on your DNA and name.
Offspring have received patronymic and matronymic names consistently across cultures and some
traditions pass down the same exact name.
The longest-running name suffix tradition came from the German House Of Reuss, which
named every son Heinrich all the way up to Count Heinrich LXXV - who ended the line with
his death as an infant.
And in 2010, Christopher Columbus XX, a naval veteran who sailed around the world, returned
to Panama 500 years after his ancestor's last voyage.
But the first widely-used device to express our individual identity to others was the
cylinder seal.
Invented in Mesopotamia, they were carved out of stone and used to create an impression
in moist clay.
These seals marked personal property, served as signatures on official documents and were
often buried with their owners alongside other precious items like gold and silver.
By 3500 BC they advanced to state a person’s name, occupation and where they lived.
For example, this seal depicts a King holding back two gryphons, which expressed his ability
to control the chaotic forces of nature.
And these symbols on the left represent his personal identity.
But cylinder seals weren’t exclusive to Kings and the elite - they were worn around
the necks of the general public and losing one was the equivalent today of losing your
ID and credit card.
If you were a weaver, your cylinder seal may feature a spider.
If you were Apilsha the weaver, you might include a mark above the spider to differentiate
yourself from Zuzu the weaver who places a mark on the right side of his spider.
As civilization advances and communities grow larger, it takes more to stand out.
Ask squirrels.
The size of a group of squirrels, called a scurry, directly influences the individuality
of signals used to choose a mate.
So whether you’re talking about Belding’s ground squirrel or high school, the larger
the group - the more symbols of individuality play a role in getting a date.
The longest lasting human symbols of identity are set in stone.
The Pyramids, tombs built to protect and preserve Pharaohs and their legacies, were constructed
with joints so tight that no water can get in and from stone so hard that no water can
penetrate it.
Which is why your neighbor’s house may be falling down but pharaoh Khufu’s tomb
is still standing after 4,500 years.
From timeless structures to timeless culture, carved in stone on the front of the Temple
of Apollo at Delphi was a simple aphorism: “Know Thyself.”
The most famous of the 147 Delphic Maxims, a list of truths to live by, it highlighted
the importance of identity as early as 6th century BC.
Sages, leaders, and human experience continued to develop life's instruction manual, but
it took another two thousand years for the first evidence of a common person saving their
data every day.
Diary or journal.
Both words come from latin - diarium meaning “daily allowance” and diurnus meaning
“of the day.”
Luca Landucci, an apothecary who learned to write by bookkeeping for his accountant father,
chronicled the city's events, which were equal parts news and drama.
It was eventually copied and passed throughout Tuscany, which makes Landucci’s blog the
first to go viral.
But his actions were an anomaly for hundreds of years to follow.
Before 1700, we have accounts of fewer than 500 diaries.
Total.
Today, there are over a billion users active on Facebook every day talking about their
lives and checking in on others.
The oldest known diary is Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, in which he advises, “Do not
act as if you were going to live a thousand years, soon you’ll be ashes or bone.
A mere name at most - and even that is just a sound - an echo.”
But saving sounds wasn’t possible until the development of the phonautograph.
Alexander Graham Bell's version used a severed human ear attached to a stylus.
When he shouted into the ear, his voice was etched into glass.
Our voices were the most reliable way to pass personal stories through oral tradition, epic
tales and song.
The first songs were inscribed in cuneiform on clay but only fragments survived.
The Seikilos Epitaph, the earliest known complete song, was recorded in ancient Greek musical
notation on a stele - a stone funerary monument.
And there’s a reason one of the oldest songs was carved into a tombstone: death has historically
been our impetus to preserve the details of life.
Not just marking graves, building temples, erecting monuments or painting funeral portraits,
but by creating probate records.
The word probate comes directly from the latin ‘probare’ meaning ‘to prove’ - the
documents created at death to prove a person lived.
My own middle name came from my great grandfather - Julius Lieber.
This genealogy book contains an entry about him that describes his entire life, a father
of six, an engineer, a skilled mechanic, with 98 words.
I’m only three generations removed from having a written legacy that fits in four
tweets.
The elements of our identities we want to record haven't changed much in thousands of
years.
Egyptian sculptor Bak created a selfie of him with his wife in 1345 BC.
Bamboo slips with a single column of Chinese characters were like Tweets in 300 BC.
The Republic of Letters exchanged ideas across Europe like a 17th century Facebook group.
And every one of your Instagrammed food photos would be carefully scrutinized by Jean Anthelme
Brillat-Savarin, who said, "Tell me what you eat; I will tell you what you are."
Often abbreviated to, “You are what you eat.”
But the immediacy and the volume have very recently changed - astronomically.
In 1995, 16 million people were connected by the internet - we’re now over 3.2 billion.
Uploading home videos, wishing a Happy Birthday to our cousin’s best friend’s sister,
reading about and interacting with people we’ll never meet face to face.
The data we transfer is predicted to reach 88.4 exabytes per month -- that’s 88.4 billion
gigabytes.
Storage numbers are getting so big we’re struggling to find ways to label them.
And recording equipment that was once prohibitively expensive is now probably in your pocket.
The free apps in a smartphone represent $900,000 worth of equipment about thirty years ago.
Copying a book before the 12th century was a lonely task reserved for trained monks that
could take a year, which is why one scribal note at the end of a book stated, "Finally
that's finished, now give me some wine!"
Today, with a Google Fiber connection and about three days, you could hypothetically
download all 37.8 million books stored at the Library Of Congress.
Until the end of the late 1800s, low literacy rates meant most people couldn’t write about
themselves even if they wanted to.
By the 1950s, we made a legitimate attempt to create a database of dreams.
And today, smart bracelets record our every heartbeat.
But heartbeat data isn’t...really...us.
So who are we recording?
Your ID, which was developed after nations realized they could no longer rely on a note
signed by a dignitary pinned to the hat of a courier as sufficient proof of identification,
records your height, birth date, and eye color.
Your social media profiles add identifiers like your favorite music or sports teams,
friends, and pictures of you wearing your favorite outfits.
It's a far cry from the 14th century, when the majority of people had the wardrobe of
a cartoon character, with “wanted posters” describing criminals by their one set of clothes.
We now have access to a previously unimaginable number of identifiers, and ways of recording
that are so easy we don't even realize we're doing it.
Immortality may be part of the new normal.
The Ancient Egyptians had to preserve their bodies through mummification, their internal
organs in canopic jars, and their faces with death masks, all in the hope that their soul
would find its way back after death.
Back home.
They believed erasing one’s memory on Earth would erase their immortality.
But the Sumerians, those inventors of the cylinder seal, believed there was no heaven
- only hell.
And by honoring their dead, buried safely below or in a shrine next to their house,
by giving them food and drink - by keeping a record of their life - they could avoid
the, “Land Of No Return.”
A place we might have eliminated without even realizing it.
And as always - thanks for watching.