How to disappear
Have you ever wondered how difficult it would be to erase all trace of your existence?
I admit that’s not something any of us normally grapple with when we have an idle moment, not when there are other things like “did I leave the iron on?” or “I need to remember to get some milk next time I’m out” or “how will we cope with our star player out injured?”
Existential issues don’t often get a look in, which probably explains why climate change, for example, isn’t top of the global agenda and a priority for all world leaders.
Anyway to return to the question, how hard is it to erase all trace of your existence? Is it possible to make it as if you never happened?
I was prompted to ask this question because of a press release which claimed 36% of people surveyed in the UK wanted to delete themselves from the Internet and limit their digital footprint. Perhaps most surprisingly, Gen Z were the most disillusioned with the Internet with half of them wanting to be deleted from it.
Now, I’ll admit that’s not quite as drastic as erasing yourself entirely from existence but in an increasingly digital age, it’s going quite far along the way.
The strange thing is that it’s very hard to remove all traces of ourselves because we have so many digital interactions every day and because so many records are kept about us. It’s not like the days when a fire in an office could delete someone’s birth record, for example. Paper records appear more vulnerable and fragile because we know that ink can fade and paper can be torn up or burnt. But the fact remains that they can last for a very long time. So they’re not as flimsy as you might think.
Digitalisation of records presumes a level of permanence. It certainly enables a level of access that we aren’t accustomed to with paper. You don’t physically have to go to where the record is stored to find it. You can search for something on the Web and scroll through reams of results. Who hasn’t searched on their own name just to find out what’s there?
But there are two interesting points about this. The first is that if you try and search for someone who lived and died before this digitalisation, it can be very difficult to find anything. Yes, you’ll find some people but others have left not a trace online. Digitally, it’s as if they never existed. This despite the fact we who remember them know they existed, that they lived and had purpose. Unless you purposely search for them in the database of records for births and deaths, you might find nothing at all.
The only reason they might exist in the digital universe is because we remember them, we upload pictures, we write something about them. The Internet holds those memories but we supply them.
Does that mean they never existed? Of course not.
By the same token, as we move further and further away from paper to purely digital records, there comes a point where our existence could be erased with a click because there is nothing tangible holding them. We assume a permanence from the digital world that isn’t necessarily there. In its own way, it can be just as fragile. Records can be deleted, they can be corrupted, they can be damaged. They are vulnerable.
Which opens up another interesting issue, what happens if we’re erased from the digital world but the physical world remembers us? Or vice versa? What happens if someone is born but dies within days in an airstrike, for example, along with their family, how do we know they existed? What if all testament to their existence is obliterated but it persists, that they have identity because someone, possibly dead too, typed their name into a computer a few days earlier.
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