By Daniel Rigney
History is taking some creepy turns in this century. Wars and video games are becoming indistinguishable from each other. Robot bombs are killing people in undeclared attacks against non-states and unlucky bystanders. Meanwhile, mass surveillance agencies are recording and storing details of the private lives of people around the world. Even the very concept of a ‘private life’ is gradually disappearing through the magic of electronic technology.
But there’s a bright side to the emergence of universal and permanent surveillance. Now, for perhaps the first time in history, even the most atheistic of atheists can imagine the possibility that individual identities will one day attain everlasting life.
Today we are privileged to witness the birth of a newly-created plane of existence. Digital immortality. The new afterlife.
Even if there is, after all, no big invisible man in the sky to remember our lives forever, NSA and its successor entities will be able to. Already NSA is building the prototype of an eternal life archive in Utah not far from where Mormons have been archiving our genealogies for decades. And NSA’s Prism program is just a sneak preview of panopticons yet to come.
So even the godless may now enjoy the blessed assurance that when we die, our identities will go to be near Salt Lake City, and just hours from Las Vegas.
I imagine that one day our current digital technology will be transcended, just as 8-track tape was surpassed by CDs and streaming audio. When that day comes, we and our descendents will probably be dragged and dropped to a higher plane, and continue to live on in some post-digital data cloud, in some undeletable form, to be rediscovered and studied in embarrassing detail by future civilizations, earthly or unearthly.
From the scraps of our digits and DNA records, future entities may reconstruct us -- if they have any reason to want to. But the sheer possibility that some deeper intelligence might want to remember us gives solace to the ephemeral soul. We may turn out to be the Sims of the future, with virtual afterlives based on the true stories of our current lives.
Without our digital identities, most of us would be entirely forgotten within a few decades. In the digital and post-digital ages, however, we will always have lived and been recorded, and our having lived will always be rememberable by Someone or Something.
Our names will be written in the book of Binarism, and we will dwell in the Cloud forever.
Thanks be to the ultimate wholeness of Zero and One. And thanks be to the theological engineers of NSA. Let us rejoice and be glad. Digital immortality, the new afterlife, is born.
Danagram
:] Coming next week: A dispatch from the WorldCom science fiction convention in San Antonio, Texas.
History is taking some creepy turns in this century. Wars and video games are becoming indistinguishable from each other. Robot bombs are killing people in undeclared attacks against non-states and unlucky bystanders. Meanwhile, mass surveillance agencies are recording and storing details of the private lives of people around the world. Even the very concept of a ‘private life’ is gradually disappearing through the magic of electronic technology.
But there’s a bright side to the emergence of universal and permanent surveillance. Now, for perhaps the first time in history, even the most atheistic of atheists can imagine the possibility that individual identities will one day attain everlasting life.
Today we are privileged to witness the birth of a newly-created plane of existence. Digital immortality. The new afterlife.
Even if there is, after all, no big invisible man in the sky to remember our lives forever, NSA and its successor entities will be able to. Already NSA is building the prototype of an eternal life archive in Utah not far from where Mormons have been archiving our genealogies for decades. And NSA’s Prism program is just a sneak preview of panopticons yet to come.
So even the godless may now enjoy the blessed assurance that when we die, our identities will go to be near Salt Lake City, and just hours from Las Vegas.
I imagine that one day our current digital technology will be transcended, just as 8-track tape was surpassed by CDs and streaming audio. When that day comes, we and our descendents will probably be dragged and dropped to a higher plane, and continue to live on in some post-digital data cloud, in some undeletable form, to be rediscovered and studied in embarrassing detail by future civilizations, earthly or unearthly.
From the scraps of our digits and DNA records, future entities may reconstruct us -- if they have any reason to want to. But the sheer possibility that some deeper intelligence might want to remember us gives solace to the ephemeral soul. We may turn out to be the Sims of the future, with virtual afterlives based on the true stories of our current lives.
Without our digital identities, most of us would be entirely forgotten within a few decades. In the digital and post-digital ages, however, we will always have lived and been recorded, and our having lived will always be rememberable by Someone or Something.
Our names will be written in the book of Binarism, and we will dwell in the Cloud forever.
Thanks be to the ultimate wholeness of Zero and One. And thanks be to the theological engineers of NSA. Let us rejoice and be glad. Digital immortality, the new afterlife, is born.
Danagram
:] Coming next week: A dispatch from the WorldCom science fiction convention in San Antonio, Texas.
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