← New Books Network
New Books Network
Thomas S. Mullaney, "How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information" (W. W. Norton, 2026)
01:16:02
Loading summary
Transcript53 lines
- [00:01]
A
Heat up your Fourth of July at the Home Depot with our wide variety
- [00:04]
B
of grills under $300 and make every gathering one to remember. Give your outdoor space a glow up whatever your budget is, with savings on seasonal plants starting at $5.
- [00:15]
A
With the grill fired up and your
- [00:17]
B
backyard set to perfection, you'll be able to invite friends and family over to kick off the party. Start celebrating with low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. Prices may vary by store.
- [00:27]
A
Exclusions apply.
- [00:27]
B
Seehomedepot.com Pricematch for details this episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies. 18 when you finally find your thing, you want the whole world to know about that thing. So you use a thing called Canva to make it an even bigger and better thing.
- [01:06]
A
Whether you want to create flyers for
- [01:08]
B
that thing, make presentations for that thing, or design merch for that thing, you can do anything so people can see your thing, feel your thing, love your thing. The next thing you know, it's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing. Welcome to the New Books Network I'm
- [01:32]
A
Caleb Zakrin, CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Thomas S. Mullaney, professor of History and UNESCO Chair in Digital Futures at Stanford University. This is the third time I've had the great fortune of interviewing Tom. I can hardly think of a more worthy ambassador for the history discipline, and the work we are discussing today, I believe, will serve as the perfect bridge from Tom's historical scholarship to the wider reading public. We're discussing Tom's latest book from Norton, how he Personal History of Information. Tom's book takes on some of the most philosophically rich ideas at the center of both history and memory. Over time, things come apart. Objects, archives, ephemera, people, memories, histories. For millennia, we relied on common tools to remember the oral tradition, writing and artifacts. In under 200 years, we developed more advanced information technology like the camera, phonograph, typewriter, computer, and more. The information encoded by these devices has a shelf life, too, decaying over time, disintegrating, becoming obscured, getting deaccessioned. How We Disappear explores this process through the lens of a family tragedy. The death of Tom's parents and the attempts to recover and remember the past. What happens when we try to recover the lives of our parents, the people who shaped our world? And what do we do when we discover the unexpected? Take us through this brilliant new book. I'm pleased today to have Tom Mulaney on the podcast. Tom, welcome to the New Books Network.
- [03:01]
B
It's great to be back. Thank you for welcoming me.
- [03:05]
A
It's really fantastic to talk with you. I think we had a very early conversation years ago. It was one of my first God, must have been one of my first 10 NBN interviews. And yeah, I really remember that one very fondly. So I'm really, I feel lucky to get the chance to speak with you a third time and I'm sure it won't be the last. And you know, for those who aren't familiar with you, I was wondering if you just introduce yourself a little bit to listeners, your broader work in history, because obviously this is, you know, this has not been the focus of your work, but has maybe been some, you know, somewhere you've been angling as you've kind of gone through the, you know, the, as you've written already quite a few books on China.
- [03:48]
B
Yeah. This is for anyone who is. This is our first introduction by way of this book. I suppose what I'm about to say will sound jarring. I'm an historian of modern China, of the history of race and ethnicity, and for the past 15 plus years, and more relevantly I guess to our discussion is history of information technology in the modern period, but thus far really has been focused on Chinese information technology, Chinese telegraphy, typewriting, computing, non Western global computing. And I'm not really a history and memory guy. I'm not a memoirist. And so this book, which is the longest book I've ever worked on in my life, it's been 24 years now, has been effectively my existential companion while doing my, my day job, I guess you could say. But I'm an east coaster. You'll learn, I guess in the book. You know, I have no living memory of where I was born in Stamford, Connecticut, because my, my parents family sort of set out on their mullany journey out of basically New York City. My brother and my sister were born in the city. I was the first and only born outside and then spent most of my time growing up in Maryland with a, with a very formative stint in St. Louis, Missouri, and have been out here at Stanford now 20 years. I finished my PhD in 2006 when I was, I guess, 27 years old and then came out here. And I've been out here ever since. So it's almost half of my life that I've been out here, but I still consider myself a transplant.
- [05:49]
A
And you've done so much thinking in your books about the type of archival work that is done by historians, the type of archives and information that historians might find and how they discuss, tell stories with that information. And then also looking at technologies as well, technologies used to record the past. Of course, at the time it might be used to record the present. But then, you know, we look back on it and historians use that material. And I was wondering how you were thinking about prior to. Even though you said you've been working on this for 24 years, in a sense, how prior to its publication, you were thinking about evidence and the stuff of history, you know, what your sort of framing or thinking was like as you went into this project.
- [06:37]
B
I think I. When I went into this project, perhaps like most people, I. I think of. I think of disintegration or I think of, you know, about the end of all things. I think I was thinking of it very materially, meaning, you know, literally paper crumbling and cracking or the sort of erosion of Steelian buildings and so forth. And it wasn't until maybe, I'm not sure at what point in the journey, but realized that, yes, the end of all things is the ultimate material degradation of everything all the way down to the atomic level, but that in the sort of here and now of human. Of human existence. So think in timescales of centuries and millennia and so forth, our timescale, that the first way that things come apart are at the seams, literally at whatever the seams are of a given information system or order. So the story I tell in the book, and it really is the origin story, is when I was a grad student at Columbia, working on my dissertation, when I write, I use note cards. I use kind of library card, catalog size note cards. And I learned this from my fifth grade teacher, Ms. Muechler, who I still to this day is in my pantheon of teachers. And she just drove into this idea of one note, one card, one note, one card, one quote, one fact. And so when I write a dissertation or a book, I end up with thousands and thousands and thousands of cards. And I'm very physical. Like, I like to find large empty spaces. When I was growing up, it'd be, you know, the living room or here at Stanford, I wait till spring break and I commandeer a classroom and I Just lay out thousands of cards in random order all throughout the space. And then I walk through the chaos of my own mind and just try to see patterns by which I mean, those two cards really go together, should be next to each other in the stack and so forth. So anyway, this was true when I was at Columbia doing my PhD and I started to think, you know, about the fragility of my system that, you know, I started to imagine what happens if, heaven forbid, there's a fire where, you know, and we all have to rush out and we are all safe, but my note cards go up in flames. Or when you're, when, when you're working on something that, like a, like a book project or like anything, you know, you have these irrational fears about how it could all come down. And then my fears got even more acute because I realized that it wasn't going to require something as dramatic as like a, you know, a block fire in Brooklyn to bring everything that I had ever done to, To a screeching halt. All that would have to happen was about 10 of those cards, maybe 20 of those cards being misplaced. They wouldn't even have to go up in flames. And these were the bibliographic references to the specific archival documents in China that magically I was permitted access to in this strange momentary act of declassification in, in, in China for stuff I probably shouldn't have been able. Permitted to see in the first place. And if I had simply left that in my backpack at a cafe and then realized it when I got home that day, because of the nature of history, all of the information and facts that I had, which were the smoking gun of my dissertation and therefore, like the centerpiece of my entire early career, would have become, in legal terms, you know, what you would say in a court of law, inadmissible evidence. Because if you can't cite it, you can't write it, it just, you can't, you can't include it. And so I started to think a lot about the strange and unexpected and fragile ways that knowledge, memory, history comes together and is kept together, but also the way that it falls apart. And for my, you know, at a personal level, family photos from a hundred years ago, I have, I have family photos from, you know, I don't know, the, the teens and twenties. So the physical medium is there. Entropy has not yet done its work at the level of, you know, of the materiality of those photos. But I have absolutely no idea nor any ability to reconstruct who any of these individuals were. So again, it sort of came apart at the invisible seams that keep, you know, keep things in the web of relations that we call knowledge or knowing or memory. And so now that I just have a bunch of photographs kind of floating in the ethereum that might as well be, you know, in a thrift store in Colorado, as far as I'm concerned, they've come detached from the web of relations. And that, that was really the beginning of the process of where my own historical work and then this broader reflection came together.
- [12:24]
A
A big part of this book is you reflecting on your parents and reflecting on who they are based on what you knew about them, what they had told, and then also information, other forms of evidence that you basically collected after their deaths. And I'm wondering if you talk about that relationship between both your own historical work, analyzing things that are impersonal and then also analyzing the personal, how you might or have used these historical tools to analyze your own personal life and what that's like.
- [13:00]
B
It connects at every, every step of the way. So, you know, I talk. The book begins with my father's sudden death. It concludes with my mother's death, which, you know, we, we, we knew she had entered hospice. We knew it was, it was coming. But the, you know, like, I mean, it's hard to, hard to exaggerate and everyone knows this for themselves, the degree to which that relationship shapes us down to the marrow. So my father had an incredibly short attention span, I guess it would be at least when it came to his family and those around him. You'd have to get through your sentence pretty quickly before he would drift off or interrupt and change the subject. And it is one of the reasons to this day that I talk as fast as I do. I came into this world in some way trying to package things in these very instantly deliverable ways. Both my parents were deeply anti intellectual and yet they had, you know, this just speaking for myself, not for my sibling, this professor kid. And, and so I, you know, there was a, there was a constant need to hold them, almost like literally, almost like verbally, like put my hands on the sides of my dad's head and just hold his attention long enough to deliver what sometimes requires explanation. You know, Sometimes a short 30 second statement is insufficient because the complexity of the thing you're describing requires that you kind of paint a picture with words. And so it, it didn't hit me how, how much that that relationship had shaped me until I wrote my dissertation in my first book. So we talked about that, I think way back when, I think that's one of the ones that we've talked about. The reason that that book is exceedingly short, like so short that I was worried that I'd have to lengthen it in order to be taken seriously for tenure here at Stanford is in no small part because of my conditioning to keep Dad's attention, to like, just deliver it as briskly as possible. There wasn't a lot of room growing up for elaboration, so to speak. So just at the starting point, these kinds of things just utterly shape you. But then in terms of, I think a broader statement about mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters, just all of these human beings that we are and that we are surrounded by is their iconographic quality. The fact that, you know, you know, we, we caricaturize everybody. Human beings are just stereotyping machines. We're just like little mental, you know, economy machines. We try to reduce the complexity just to get through the day. But there's something unique about family members that your brother is your brother, your mom is your mom, your dad is your dad. They are, they are, they are. They are specifically these personae. And then if you're lucky, they're human beings in like some broader three and four dimensional way. And I think in some, for some families, and I've enjoyed this by kind of having a front row seat at. I would describe them as maybe more intimate and functional families through friends and, you know, through my. Through my wife and through, you know, ex girlfriends or whatever it is. This is, is this incredible front row seat to see what it's like when a family has enough togetherness, where you're sitting with your partner and your partner's father is there, but his brother is also at the table, like, you know, the uncle and maybe there's a grandmother. And so what's interesting is that you actually do get to see these individuals as the composite of. They're this person's father, but this person's brother and this person's son and this person's cousin and this person's neighbor. And it gives you at least some of a dimensionality, like the facets and you can almost composite together. Wow. You know, this is a human being who metabolizes, wakes, lives, you know, eats, sleeps and will, you know, will pass and has all these sorts of anxieties for, for me growing up, I never saw any of that. And I talk about this in the book. You know, I. My brother was my mom. Sorry. My father was an only child, but I really knew my grandparents very, very little. We had lots of cousins, but I didn't. I didn't meet any of them. My mother was estranged from her family. So throughout life, they were pure icons. They were dad, and that is it. They were, you know, Mom. Is that the best that I ever saw was them as neighbors, perhaps, but never. I never saw the fragility of them as children or as siblings, really. And because we moved around so much and were far away from, like, the nest of the Malenys, and it turns out, very far away from the nest of whom I. My mother's family, it was all theirs to share or to withhold. They could. They could control the narrative in ways that most people don't get to control because, you know, and so there is this weird feeling where I spend my professional life trying to find and reconstruct and kind of restore the dimensionality of these people in the past who are totally strangers to me. And yet my. The people that I love more than anyone on planet Earth are masks, are icons. And I. And I know them as human beings very, very, very little. And so there was that weird tension and irony that disturbed me throughout, you know, throughout my life, but especially in my adult life.
- [19:51]
A
Right. And part of the sort of the narrative or story you tell about your own upbringing and in relation to your parents is the way in which they obscured themselves from you. Not only were the fact. Obviously, all parents to a certain extent, will obscure themselves from their children deliberately. They want to appear rock solid. They don't want to let the children know I am human too, because otherwise they won't listen, hey, you're wrong. You don't know what's going on, just as much as I don't know what's going on. But parents do that, and it's a. It serves a purpose, but it also makes it hard for us when we become adults or when we start to age ourselves, to actually understand where we come from and to uncover that, and especially when we start to go looking and looking at the evidence, then it can be sometimes quite jarring. And one of the concepts that you look at in the very beginning of the book, which is such an interesting idea, is the relationship between information and entropy. I don't think that these are two concepts that unless someone's familiar already with Shannon's work, that they're going to naturally put together. And I was wondering if you could just talk a little about the kind of the technical definition of what information is and how it's related to entropy, just to kind of get people into that frame to think about why the Kind of the idea that you're getting at here is actually very central to what history is all about.
- [21:15]
B
Sure. So entropy is one of these moving targets that has indifferent, you know, different arenas been defined in different ways. And the story, and I think this has been validated, but it has that apocryphal quality is that when Claude Shannon is having a conversation on, you know, I'm trying to define the sort of measurement of uncertainty inside communication systems and it's recommended that he adopt the term entropy. And one of the reasons is that, well, physicists don't really know what this is. So just use, just use this term that. Not any, that everyone's kind of fuzzy and therefore you'll kind of get away with it. But the way that Shannon, you know, Shannon is coming up in the early 20th century at a time of this, what we would think of now as this communications revolution. He is coming of age in, let's call like, let's call it the, the half century maturation of telephony long distance communication at a distance. He's coming up in, let's say, just towards the end of the first century of telegraphy. I mean, this is a really formative moment in the global history of technology and communications. And like with many technologies, very few technologies are born on solid theoretical ground. They're generally kind of jimmied together and bootstrapped and figured out. And there is this moment at which either the technology has proven its worth financially and in other ways to justify, but also has a reach of sufficient complexity to justify the need to put this on solid theoretical grounds. And that is there are others in the story. But, you know, Shannon is principal among those that are putting communication, you know, this new novel form of electronic communication at a distance on solid mathematical grounds. And so that's where you have the mathematical theory of communication. The initial formulation is of communication, not of information. And then it becomes, of course, the birthplace of information theory. And then we are all the great, great, great grandchildren of this framework. You know, it is the. You cannot have file compression and you cannot have different kinds of transmission regimes without this. And then physics, which is really the origin point, has its sort of an earlier definition. What, what I try to do in the course of the book is offer what I consider to be a kind of minimum pragmatic definition of information. So if we were sitting down with an information theorist, if we're sitting down with someone that is literally the descendant, the discipline, advisee, descendant of Shannon, there are specific technical definitions of, of information. What I. The maneuver that I decided to work with in the book is that information, as the term itself suggests, is the putting into formation of material and abstract components in some kind of configuration for the purpose of capturing, storing, transmitting meaning, in our case, as human beings, human meaning. And it is the upkeep of that configuration once it's been put into place. So that could be, you know, what counts as an information can be deeply material, physical kind of arrangements of things, or they can be more abstract. So the example that I give in the book is if one were to try to sit down and using a series of batteries and coils and kind of, you know, wires and make something that when fed to inputs, could output the arithmetic sum of something. So a binary adder, if I give it an on, I give it an on. So I've given it one plus one. Can we create a configuration that achieves this special effect basically of outputting the correct arithmetic sum of 2? And the answer is yes, there is a particular, there more than one way to do it, but there is a circuit diagram where you could put together this particular configuration of components and create the special effect of one of the core features of human meaning making, which is arithmetic and mathematics. And that if you wanted to take that further and say, I would like to pull together a group of more components and put them into some sort of arrangement, some sort of orchestration of them. And you know, what else might be possible? And the answer is what we're doing right now, zoom sitting on zoom, having this conversation and have it being recorded, is nothing more and nothing less than the phenomenally complex arrangement or putting into formation of a set of kind of assembly pieces, none of which on their own has the capacity to carry, store, transmit meaning in any way, shape or form. It is completely out of this orchestration that that happens. And that when you start to really squint at the world around you, what you realize is that this is true certainly of any human made configuration, that we're just surrounded by incalculable numbers of these informations as part of this grand orchestration of, in our case, as the human species of human meaning making. And these involve abstract things too. So I talk about teaching the Alphabet song to my kids or anyone teaching any a family in Shanghai teaching their kid Pinyin or teaching their kid, you know, basic strokes in a Chinese character. We have this tendency as human beings to kind of forget childbirth, I guess this and there is to just to teach the next generation. Basic literacy for A through Z requires a phenomenal metabolic, just orchestration of energy and time and repetition just to get this next little cohort of little mini human organisms to be able to look at a page of printed text and to, in a kind of deeply felt muscle memory way, be able to read a menu and order, you know, order a lemonade off the, from, from, from, from the waiter at your local cafe. But if we were to go on strike, if we, if human, if humankind were to go on strike and say, you know, until you meet our demands, we refuse to sing the Alphabet song to any of our kids or practice pinyin or whatever, then the Latin Alphabet would in a certain number of years fall back. And this is the key, not fall into, but fall back into, into the fundamental meaninglessness that it, that it always is. The reason it is meaningful is because of the phenomenal work that went into putting this meaning making system into formation. But even more monumental has been the upkeep of this system now for millennia. But as soon as we do it, and as soon as our 6 year old or a 7 year old or 8 year old can read text again, we sort of civilizationally forget the pains of this process and treat it as if it exists in some state form. And that's the main basic argument of the book, which is not like a revelation. It's just let's really observe this and pay very close attention. From the moment the universe was born, entropy is in play. The universe is falling apart from the moment of its inception. Life, the putting into formation of things in some semi deliberate way comes much, much, much later in the story. And so entropy doesn't happen to information. Information is the thing that's happening to an entropic universe. But we kind of flip the script on that and treat entropy like it's, you know, like it's a shot out of the blue or something that disrupts. It's like ants disrupting an otherwise peaceful picnic. But that's, that's really not the case.
- [31:12]
A
You thought this was your run Club era. Turns out it was more of a thinking about Run Club era.
- [31:18]
B
The good news, Someone's marathon training is about to start. Sell your workout gear on Depop.
- [31:25]
A
Just snap a few photos and we'll
- [31:27]
B
take care of the rest.
- [31:28]
A
They get their race day fit and
- [31:30]
B
you get a payout for trying. Someone on Depop wants what you've got. Start selling now. Depop where taste recognizes taste. Uncovered windows can make your home feel up to 20 degrees hotter. Stay cool and save up to 45% off custom window treatments during the 4th of July VIP access sale at blinds.com from outdoor shades to room. Darkening blinds. Finding the perfect fit is easy. Get free samples, expert design help, and professional measure and install services, or DIY it with confidence and support every step of the way. Shop up to 45% off site wide right now during the 4th of July VIP access sale@blinds.com.
- [32:12]
A
and we're live from the living room as Doug eyes up the Match Day spread. He's reaching for the buffalo wing. Perfect. Hang on. What's this? Oh, he's gone for a can of Pepsi too. Incredible. What a finish. Sensational combination. Look at the delight on his face. There's no doubt about it. It just tastes better. Match days deserve Pepsi. Food deserves Pepsi.
- [32:37]
B
Grab a pack of Pepsi.
- [32:38]
A
Zero sugar for today's match. It's poetry in motion, right? Well, it is sort of interesting that it feels like with entropy, there are these two stories going on, right? There's this story of things coming apart, but also things coming together in a way, in information as you've outlined it. And I want to go with this. One of the examples that you talk about in this book about a new technology that then almost gives us the sense that with this new technology, we will now halt entropy. We will be able to understand the past better because we will have a better picture and, you know, literally a better picture with photography. So with language, of course, we know that the problem with language is, especially without writing, that the meaning of words change over time. What is preserved is different than what necessarily was seen. You can read a beautiful poem from 300 years ago of someone describing a scene, and we know on some level that the adjectives can mean a lot to different people. But if you have a photograph of something, well, now we know what Keats might have actually seen. We're not just reading his poem. So can you talk a little bit about this sort of sense of, like, every time we invent a new technology that seems to capture the present better, then we think, oh, well, this will help future historians. Can you talk about just that dynamic a little bit?
- [33:59]
B
Yeah, I mean, the camera is a great example. So, you know, I think in my little mini inventory, which I'll share, is let's get down to the chemical composition of photography at different points. You know, so many people don't realize
- [34:18]
A
that
- [34:21]
B
what at the.
- [34:22]
A
At the.
- [34:23]
B
At the. At the kind of physical and chemical level, what different forms of film have been able to capture at different moments, what that means. So the example that, you know, I refer to in the book is early photography's inability to capture certain parts of, I think it's the red spectrum out of which we capture the qualities of the subsurface scattering of light inside the nooks and crannies of our face and pores, in our face. It's the thing that gives the human face its warmth and its softness. And uh, we, in photographs of Abraham Lincoln, we don't have that, that meaning quite literally. The chemistry of photography at that point does not capture that part of the, you know, let's. The spectrum. And yet we look at this photograph of Lincoln and we feel like, ahaha. Unlike, you know, again, unlike Herodotus, for which we just have a statue. And who knows if that's really what it looked like. This really is Lincoln and it really is not in some capacity. And you could take this further of photography is a technology that like every technology, very rapidly gets what historians of technology refer to as domesticated, that sort of made part of everyday life. And we all know that we are far more likely to photograph a wedding than a divorce. We are far more likely to photograph an event than an uneventful moment. The number of photos of someone like getting up in the middle of the night to pee is a fraction of those when they are at graduation in their cap and gown. And so then you have this entirely other subset of what this particular technology, what kind of regimes of association that this technology is brought into. And you might say, well, that's not fair. I mean, yes, we have more of this than that. There are more poems about X than there are poems about Y. But here's the key, is that like, to your point, photography, and this is Susan Sontag we're talking about here, this is not me. It captures with it an unprecedented lifelikeness, this verisimilitude that defeats in many ways our own judgment and really tricks us into thinking that we're looking through a window at something. And so when we have millions and millions and millions of photographs about particular, really, really particular subsets of the human experience and effectively none about most others, this inevitably, and I say this as an archival historian who I've worked in over 100 archives in 20, it skews, it skews you in different directions just because of the sheer abundance of certain kinds of recordings over others. And then there is of course, this retroactive, I call them, you know, instant extinction, is that for each new technology that emerges, there is perhaps an inevitable, but a very, very high probabilistic moment where a schism, a line is drawn from the arrival of that photography such, you know, of that technology, in this case, Photography such that everything after it, after its existence, forms an entirely different feel of the past than everything before it. And there can be a dividing line between, you know, we only have portraits or sculptures or poetic descriptions of everything before this point. And then after this point, we have JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. And Gandhi captured in this way. And so what we need to keep in mind is that this process doesn't stop. You know, and I end that one chapter by saying what exactly? We, like you, me, our neighbors, everyone alive right now, what technology all of us are living before and will never, ever be integrated into? We don't know. And we won't know in the course of our life. That will come later. But chances are very high that whatever that technology is will be by definition, unable to sort of reach back into and invite us into that world. So instead of a mindset, we have a preservationist mindset. And in many ways, I really do believe that we, as a human organism, like, we have to. I'm not critiquing us as human beings. I'm not saying there's an alternative. I actually think it's essential to our survival that we think in these ways. But at the same time, we should also realize that it is a coping mechanism and that what we're really talking about for any technology, no matter its scale and capacity to capture, all we are ever talking about in the broader scheme of entropy is pathways of disappearance. That, yes, an MPEG file, a TIFF image, you know, a MOV audio recording, it has a different degradation pathway than, say, a Kodak, you know, a printed kodak film from 1950. They don't disappear or disintegrate in the same way, but all of them do. And when we move, when we move from one regime of recording to another regime of recording, what we are doing at the grand scale of things is shifting from, you know, in my case, 101 to 280 south. Both are the. Both highways lead. Lead to the same destination. But yes, they are different pathways to that destination.
- [40:55]
A
I want to talk a little bit about archives themselves because, you know, obviously historians do research in all sorts of ways. One of the main places that historians do research is in archives, which are produced by people where they will bring together documents from the past, other, you know, ephemera, things that are going to be useful for the historian to write about to actually understand the people of the past. And, you know, like you said, by no means are you critiquing archives. They're necessary in many ways. But how do you think about them differently. You know, understanding this, understanding this almost constructed nature, the fact that, but there's so much missing, there's so much unsaid, there is so much in the almost composition of it that is, you know, going to be, you know, when you access, if you Access it now versus 20 years from now, the archive is going to be different. Like can we, like stepping into a river. Can we step into the same archive twice?
- [41:53]
B
I think the first and most bracing again, it's not my, I don't consider it to be my discovery, but I, but I try to swarm it as much as possible and get my mind around it as much as possible. Is the degree to which in. For the modern archive, you know, archives of, for those of us who work, say in the past three, 400 years, let's say of time or even 500 years, the, the, it's hard to exaggerate the outsize influence of the modern state on the composition of that, of that archive of archives as a whole and of kind of archival sensibilities. And on the one hand that's an obvious point because states are among the biggest archivers in the world. I mean they, they, they, they literally keep the, they are record keepers in this sort of way. But I mean something at a subtler level and the way I talk about it in the book and standing on the shoulders of Ian Hacking and others is that the state that we understand today in its size and scope, just thinking of the United States for example, is really a 19th century phenomenon. The sort of the number of men under arms and the size of the federal government and the size of state bureaucracy before and after, like the American Civil War is stunning. And you know, kind of getting into Charles Tilley that states, you know, war, states make wars and wars make states and what the, what European kind of intra continental European conflict did to the size and growth of states and all of its trappings is, is, is phenomenal colonialism, empire, the birth of the passport and the birth of certain kinds of documentation. But out of that there is a distinct pattern to the records that do and don't get kept. And I guess it's pretty self evident. But when you tally it up, it's I, I again consider it bracing is that we have inordinately more traces left from the past for anything that worries or excites the state. We have for every one, you know, border crossing or ship manifest that had to go through Ellis island or naturalization process or passport or you know, draft registration or the purchase of a home, the paying of taxes, the evasion of taxes. For every one of those, or every million of those, we have one. If not, if that many, that is a trace of this, the immense rest of the pie chart of human experience. The state does not worry whether you and I ponder the monarch butterfly that walked by. It has no salience, no relevance to anything the state is aspiring to or is afraid of. And that set of aspirations and fears reverberates through every aspect of the historical practice of the modern world. And we know it, we just don't really, fully, fully, fully admit it. And the reason for that is one of the reasons for it is that the practice of history, like professional history, the kinds of history that are done by PhDs who go on to write university press books, is because in many ways the requirements of that profession, the documentation, the citation, the chain of custody, admissible and inadmissible evidence and all, is actually quite similar to the bureaucracy of the state. And you know, what one needs to have in order to prove a case in court. So we share, you know, we share a lot of, we have a lot of a shared DNA, a lot of shared genome between. Even though academic historians are among the most acidic and acerbic and annoying to stake power, but we actually share a lot of DNA between these two groups of people. And when you just do a project and you go into the archives and you're looking for that thing and you just want that little slice of the archive, you're in a place that has millions and millions of documents, but you're there to see one box. It's easy to, you can't see the big picture. And so you have that one box, you open it up, and lo and behold, what do you find. You find patent documents, you find official communications, you find, you find more of the kinds of things that again, fit this broader pattern, whether it's, you know, the aspirations or anxieties of states or the aspirations and anxieties of corporations and institutions. It's not as if everything that human beings do leave a trace and then some of those traces survive and some of them don't. The story is that even before the question of what survives and what doesn't is the traces that get made versus those that never ever have a chance of it are already vastly skewed in a very particular direction. And that's the starting point. You can fight against it. There are brilliant historians who find ways, find leaks, find ways to sort of, you know, push their minds into, into these different cracks and crevices. But at some level there is a ceiling to how much we can do that because of the nature of how historical traces are made themselves. This episode is brought to you by Fox 1. Watch all 104 matches of the FIFA World cup live in 4K for just $19.99 a month with 3 days free. Build your own multi view, choose up to three streams and follow player spotlights. Stay on top of every moment with live stats, highlights and instant replays. The FIFA World cup, streaming live on Fox One, offers a subject to change. See fox.com for complete terms and conditions. Choice Hotels get you more of what you value. Here's a little tune to help you remember. Same drive, different day. Don't you wish you were getting away?
- [48:52]
A
Pack your bags and come on through
- [48:55]
B
Texas, Ohio, Alaska, we're up there too
- [48:58]
A
Comfort Inn, it's calling your name Save on the stage.
- [49:05]
B
Oh, and free waffles are yours to claim.
- [49:08]
A
Well, I hope you like my little
- [49:09]
B
song book direct@sourcehotels.com Chronic migraine is 15
- [49:14]
A
or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox Onobotulinum Toxin A prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine before they start. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It prevents on average eight to nine headache days a month versus six to seven for placebo. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulties swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions including als, Lou Gehrig's disease, Myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome and medications including botulinum toxins as these
- [50:05]
B
may increase the risk of serious side effects.
- [50:07]
A
Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-844botox to learn more. One of the most compelling criticisms I've seen of this notion of AGI that we're eventually going to reach a point where the the LLMs and the chatbots are going to basically surpass all human knowledge and I suppose even surpass historians ability to write history. Is this idea that there are so many unwritten rules and that when you have these texts that are, I mean, these chatbots that are trained on basically textual corpuses, then the problem is that it's going to miss out on all these things that like you said, are just kind of like the water we swim in. We don't even notice that it's there. It's just something that we do and we're not aware of it. Which is I think, part of what you're saying that there's so much that isn't getting captured in part because it doesn't seem worth mentioning because it's so as if it's everydayness, but if we're trying to actually construct the past, that everydayness actually matters quite a bit. I wonder if you could just talk a little about this idea. You know, just thinking about that. Obviously there's not really, it's not, you know, there's not that much about AI that you talk about, but just that I think it is really important and crucial how people are thinking about information. This idea that, you know, these, these tools are going to become so advanced that it'll actually resolve this, these, some of these issues of entropy, oh yeah,
- [51:38]
B
I utterly and completely agree with that. I mean, AGI, as we are currently probably discussing it is the apogee of a sort of disembodied labor offset. It's a similar notion that the cult of individualism and the inventor and the author. It makes sense that it was coined by a subset of the population that offloaded all labor onto other individuals and, and, and discounted all forms of tacit and embodied and non documented knowledge. And that, that is the very sort of fetish of, I mean, I mean we have to be very, very specific around this particular era of time of landed white male colonial power that offloaded all sorts of metabolic work and labor, etc, onto a kind of cloud of disavowed, kind of a penumbra of disavowed human beings. That, that, that cult of the author is what gives us the, the currency of AGI, which is the, you know, the written form and the fetishization of the written form over all else, over all other ways of knowing or all other ways of transmission transmitting that which is known from, from, you know, one generation to the next. And so yes, by its very definition, if human experience and human history is a guide here, there is great reason to be concerned. Because what we know from human history and the attempt to reconstruct it is that it is exceedingly difficult, if not absolutely impossible to reverse engineer tacit knowledge from the traces of documented, you know, information that we, that we have, it's not a, it's not a simple one way reverse engineering of that which hasn't been written down. It is, it is. And I'll. There's a story that comes to mind. I don't think I talk about it in the book, but it really, really sat with me. I was talking with this brilliant MacArthur genius grant winning paper maker. We had an interview in the book, but there's another passage that came up in our interview. So he studied under these Japanese master paper makers in a kind of journeyman style way of coming up through a knowledge system so very, very much sort of direct transmission. And he told me a story about in the 20th century that the Japanese government, like the post war Japanese government set out to document in fine detail crafts and artisanship in Japan. So this is a Japanese government initiative vis a vis Japanese artisanal work. And I think one of the, you know, chapters or books in this encyclopedia, let's call it, had to do with paper making. And there were like these precision diagrams of all the tools and there were these sort of, you know, exhaustive lists of the recipes and, and the, and the, and the order of operations and the sequence by which you do X, Y or Z and A, B and C. And he asked his teacher, aren't you worried about this? Like this, this feels as if it's just this huge expropriation of knowledge. And aren't you worried that like you will sort of, I don't know, be sidelined or. And the response by the, you know, the master teacher is no, this is worthless. It's like, what do you mean? How could it be worthless? And the teacher pointed to one of the diagrams in the book. This is me recounting a story recounted to me, pointed to one of the diagrams in the book and said, what is nowhere in this explanation that if you hold that particular tool, I think it was a particular like knife or blade, if you hold it at slightly, the wrong angle with your wrist, it's wrong. Like you get it wrong. So even with this exhaustive inventorying, there has never been a documented exhaustive inventory of the full scope of how to do anything, you know, let alone anything of any kind of complexity. And this is why we have things like, you know, work to rule strikes where management is saying, you know, we, we want X, Y or Z. And then, and the actual laborers, the actual workers invent this form of strike in which they literally follow the guidelines that management has written to describe their work and said, let us show you how poorly this actually captures what we bring to the table. We'll follow your hundred bullet point instructions and watch as efficiency falls and output falls and bottlenecks form. And it's just this, it's just these moments where the full scope of what is actually happening come, come to the fore. But to your point and to the point of these particular, you know, observers of the discussion of AGI are clearly saying is all by definition that LLMs are training on are the workbooks made by, you know, made by the managers, so to speak. And by the way, we are also manage of our own life. If I were to ask you to write a guidebook on how you do what you do with new books, network and everything, and you're like, okay, I am the one who made this with all of my colleagues, of course I should be able to like put it would once again be like that Japanese artisanal encyclopedia. You would not be able to do it, but then you'd put it up online and a system would train on it. And in theory we would have the generalized intelligence of Caleb, but we would have no such. We would have no such thing. And that's the point where, you know, just to tie this back to photography and verisimilitude and Susan Sontag is AGI is the, is the, is the next level of this next level technology that clearly defeats our defense systems. As human beings, we really believe that we are looking at the truth when we look at the chatbot. Now, forget photographs. There's a whole other level of like epistemic trust that goes on. So here's the kicker. People will read some portion of the AGI that has trained upon your guide to running a podcast. It will understand that as the totality of knowledge. And those who are navigating it will also likely, you know, understand it as the totality of knowledge. And that would then be the true schism. That would be the loss of something right then and there, because that's, that's the definition of lost in translation. Lost in translation is not the moment when two people don't understand each other and they're aware that they don't understand each other. Lost in translation is when two people, both people are utterly convinced that something is happening, that something lossless is happening in which everything was lost, in fact, and then both people go on their way for the rest of their lives thinking that something happened that didn't. That's an utterly irreco, you know, unrecoverable loss that happens in that moment because no one is even aware That a loss took place. Yeah, right.
- [60:11]
A
Yeah. And I think that that's so important to understanding the dilemma that we face just in terms of recovering the past is that we don't know what we're not recovering. It's like the famous Donald Rumsfeld quote about the unknown unknowns. There's something that comes in at the end which I find really fascinating, which is that so much of history we think of as things that humans either left intentionally or unintentionally. Oftentimes the smoking gun for historians isn't the thing that someone set out and wrote. This is what will be things that people remember me for. It's the private letters that they intended to have burned after their death, but somehow made it through that reveal what they were actually thinking about something or at least give a better picture of what their, you know, what the official account was. And even without these things, even without the artifacts, even without the coins, without the, you know, the other things that kind of fall through the cracks and that we, you know, dig up later, there is, there's also biology too. And you tell this sort of story about your mother and the way in which she tried to obscure herself to you and how these, these sorts of, these new tools and of biology, you know, these, these genetic testing tools revealed something about her and even and then revealed something about you that you weren't aware of. And that this is something new that, you know, that we're confronting is the extent to which we now have knowledge of ourselves in a way that no one in history ever did. And it's undoing a lot of narratives that we've thought of, but we're not sure exactly. Maybe that's a bad thing. Maybe it's good that we can myth make, that we can self create, that we can invent identities, pass scrutiny, pass in certain cases as other than what biology might say we are. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about genetic testing and how that sort of figures into the kind of the. A big part of the story that you're telling here about history.
- [62:31]
B
Yeah, I think it comes back to this idea of the trace that's left and then having really no meaning without this web of associations. And it's really the web of associations, the scenes where things come apart. So I suppose without revealing too much before readers have a chance to read it, I guess I'll just say for reasons that I will never understand. And that's really the key. That's, I guess, the web of associations that was broken as I discovered My mom lived her life in concealment of, of, of something about herself, her family. And although towards the, you know, the end of the, the portion of life where is documented in the book, I find the answer that I had, I had very, very long suspected something was, was, was peculiar. But there's something, some, some absolute inequality with my ability to know my, at least some aspects and facts of my father's side of the family versus my mother's side of the family and just the sort of general secrecy and things. So I ultimately find the, I get to the bottom of it in, in a, in a factual way. But what she succeeded, and in that sense she did not succeed in keeping in, you know, in keeping that, but she did because the reasons, the motivations, you know, why this was essential presumably to her survival or getting through the
- [64:28]
A
day
- [64:31]
B
will forever be unknown to me, to my siblings, to, and the only two people who probably had a fighting chance of really explaining why it is I needed to do this or why it is that your mom needed to do this, to conceal in these sorts of ways is or was X, Y or Z are both now gone. And that would be my mother. And it turns out my father, because my father was absolutely kind of a co conspirator in the concealment. And what's amazing is I don't know how she learned how to do this. I mean she was better at covering her tracks than a cold War era espionage ring because there's no moment, you know, what we, what we imagine are these moments that are captured in film where, you know, a hidden document inside a music box reveals itself and we have it or you know, something behind a painting or tucked into something is just kind of in pure expository form, just sort of lays it all out. And not just the fact of what was unknown, but also the why of its concealment. And as for any readers who do read the book, I hope you'll see that at any moment, literally at any moment she could have unburdened herself, she could have just sat us down and had a conversation and it probably would have, it would have been the equivalent of lying that you were left handed all this time. Something along those lines and, and finding and, and finding out. Son, I want to tell you that, you know, every time you've ever seen me write with my right hand or do this, I, you know, I've, I've, I've been just carrying this weight of concealment. And so now you know, now I know. Oh my gosh, you're left handed. You write with your left hand. But I have so many more questions. Why carry this phenomenal emotional burden? And where did this start? And when. You know, when did it occur to conceal and what. When did it. Is the part of. And I, you know, it hits me because I. It's a form like that kind of holding and evading and obscuring that doesn't. That's not. That doesn't come. That comes at a price, you know, a psychic toll or just an energy and a form of suffering. And I have no understanding of. And I never will as to, like, why do that to oneself in the absence of any apparent kind of clue, whether through my connection after my mom's death with my aunt and just sort of walking through conversations and actually my aunt being equally kind of. And I take. I mean, I tend to be able to read people's voices fairly well, like a sincere. I really don't know. And then it becomes this, you know, drives back this home point. The earlier part we were talking about, which is. I love the way you said it. You know, there is something about being a parent where in order to get through the day yourself, which is no small feat when you're a parent, like, getting through days is most of the job a lot of the time. And getting your kids through the day, which is this extra feat, requires that you adopt this iconographic, you know, Persona, this. This mask, this performance. It is essential. It's not bad parenting. It is parenting. And yet it. And, and, and it's. It's because of love and it's because of survival, and it's because of everything that life needs. It is not. You're not doing damage. It's not the wrong thing to do, but it comes at this cost that then. I don't know if it's just inevitable that the very individuals who at their deepest marrow, like, love you, by definition, don't know you. We rob our children of our humanity because. And, but by which I mean our multidimensionality and our just, you know, our everydayness and our own just getting through things. And maybe there's a moment in some people's lives where they. They take that road trip as adults with their adult parent and their adult, and they're talking about their own kids. And they get that moment to kind of catch up before one or the other leaves the planet, you know, leaves life. And maybe that's where some of that work gets done. But it's a very, very strange feeling to not really have. Have that. And then to find that there was this weight that my mom just walked around with a backpack full of rocks and I have no idea why, no idea why. So there's so you know, to back to the genetic testing and actually the way I first, first, first really discovered it was, you know, things like ancestry.com is really like the Dancing with the Stars of knowledge systems. You know, we're. If Dancing with the Stars is an economy based, based on kind of washed out ex celebrities who producers can probably get at bargain basement prices, but there's still some value to them that we can squeeze out of them by having them dance on TV in this spectacular way but do it at really cost effective ways. Ancestry.com is a bunch of people walking into like city bureaus everywhere and saying, you know, just buying this, buying this data at bulk, like what are you going to do with all of these ship manifests? What are you going to do with all of these passport? What are you going to. So it really is about the breakdown, the economic disintegration of one system that then is hoovered up and gobbled up by another, you know, another chapter in this that then becomes things like ancestry.com and so it's within that system that I looked one more time and found, you know, finally found my mother's father. And so it is out of the breakdown of one set of systems in this case is basically 19th and early 20th century bureaucracies falling apart. The way that the great private libraries of like medieval Europe and early modern Europe eventually fall apart and get hoovered up and gobbled up into all of the libraries we know today. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's one big thrift shop. It's one big fire sale. So it's never so simple as entropy is. Things just getting simpler and simpler and simpler. We're in this kind of snow globe and at the beginning of time the snow globe got shook and it's working its way through all of these eddying and it's working its way towards ultimate heat death. But in the process of working its way through that, it takes billions of years and all sorts of fascinating, interesting structures form and patterns form within that. The British Library ancestry.com, you know, 23andMe Stanford University. These are these things that form and endure for some period of time. But inside the context of this unbelievably large and complex snow globe that is working its way down to stasis. And so along the way there can be these epiphanies where we do tap into, you know, an air bubble inside a glacier and suddenly like the ancient, you know, ecosystem comes back to us or we decipher hieroglyphics and for a moment we have this re established connection with the pharaohs. But even those are still happening within the context of this entropic, you know, this entropic pathway. And that's, you know, I'm not going to lie, there's an ache to that fact. It's a hard fact to accept, but it is the fact. And so that's what the book is an attempted, attempted reflection on is. This isn't about me getting over this or reader helping you get over this. It's going to be hopefully as painful as a recognition it was before versus after reading it. But I hope the sort of optimism of the book is it is miraculous that these little eddies and patterns inside of this snow globe are nothing to take for granted. But that's what we tend to do in our everyday life.
- [74:28]
A
From the vantage point of mitochondrial eve. We are 8 billion little threads that have broken off. So to what extent the breaking off or the tearing apart of different things into different new formations, like it's, you know, I think it's to a certain extent, like, like you said, like, I love the way that you put it, if you could say it again, like the entropy is, you know, we are. What was the phrase that you used about entropy? I think that's such an interesting phrase.
- [74:59]
B
Entropy is not happening to us, we are happening to entropy. And every, every information that you see around you is a high wire act. It's man on wire, every single one of them, down to the level of, down to the level of our cellular structure, all the way up to the largest information technological systems that we make. And of course, and we're not alone in this. This is a life story. This is across the full, you know, organismic spectrum. And so bask in that a little bit. Bask in that just a little bit.
- [75:47]
A
Yeah. My pitch to readers is that I think that this is a great book where you get both personal story that really does, I think will be relatable in many ways for a lot of people, even if the exact story isn't this something. I think everyone has had this experience of learning things about their parents or grandparents that shocked them, that sort of upended their own self conception. But you also do give a kind of a great crash course in information technology history in almost like this memorable poetic styling. I think it sticks much more, it'll stick with readers much more than just a straight history. And then in addition to that too, you also wrestle with some of the most challenging ideas at the heart of the philosophy of history. So I really do recommend readers check it out. And it's a quick read as well. You could chew on it for a while, but it's something that I think everyone could dedicate some time to. So Tom, thank you so much for being guest on the New Books Network for the third time. I look forward to future conversations. It was really wonderful to speak with you about this book.
- [77:01]
B
Thank you very much.
- [77:14]
A
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying going. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to 15 per month required Intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees, extra fee, full terms@mintmobile.com.