Disaster

I wonder sometimes how haunting the internet will be in a few hundred years, if it stays around for that long. If some way all the things people are posting now do not get destroyed and the memory of the internet doesn’t die. Imagine opening a blog of a person who lived 200 years ago. Imagine not only seeing his face on a photo or a couple lines from his diary, like we do, but seeing all of it. Something about a tv show you know nothing about, several lines of an old joke you can’t get without the needed context, words of anger, words of pain, words of love and happiness. Imagine opening an Instagram account of your ancestor. Seeing their young face lit up by sunlight, in a sundress with a Pina Colada by a pool on a day you have no way learning more of. Imagine seeing short videos of your ancestor sharing a recipe or dancing to music; you don’t know the artist, but you can look in their young eyes. They are dead already, but a part of them lives on here. Imagine seeing the art that they created, the thoughts that they had, what bothered them. Imagine falling a little bit in love with a stranger who’s died long, long before you were born. Manuscripts don’t burn on the internet.