I just read this in a New York Times piece about computing in 2016:

Future trends in computer imaging and storage will make it possible for a person, wearing a tiny digital device with a microphone and camera, to essentially record his or her life.

Whoopee.

I mean, can you imagine? Isn't it dreadful enough to go through it all once? And would anyone want to see it the second time around? Soon they'll be inventing computers to watch the nonstop video version of our lives they're now inventing computers to record.

People think they want to preserve those precious moments:

Rick Rashid, a computer scientist and head of Microsoft’s research labs, noted that he would like to see a recording of the first steps of his grown son, or listen to a conversation he had with his father many years ago. “I’d like some of that back,” he said. “In the future, that will be possible.”

It's possible now, isn't it? I mean, technically. It's still not quite kosher to interrupt one of your old man's harangues to say, "hang on, dad, I forgot to press 'record'—OK, let's take it from the top, pop!" But if it takes a few takes for your kid to get those first steps right you can pick the best one when you edit it.

We already collect way more data about our lives than we could ever actually use. And if we did use it, what would we use it for, anyway? That's the puzzling thing. Each of us seems to be stuffing our own time capsule to the gills, but who will ever want to unpack it? Are our lives really that interesting? Wouldn't a shoebox of photographs and a few old love letters tied together with faded ribbon suffice?

The problem with this technology is not that it's not cool. It's that there's no one around to make it really worthwhile. I mean, there are very few Sir Richard Francis Burton's out there these days, for example. There's a man who lived a thousand and one lives, practically, and left a vast store of fascinating observations for the rest of us to sift through. After he died, though, his wife went through his things and burnt a good many of his notes and letters. And when you think of it, you've got to wonder—I mean, it had to be some good shit, if she was so intent on keeping it from the public eye. Almost seems like a crime against humanity—or at least against civilization.

But not every life is an epic novel. Not many are, in fact. Some are haiku. That's part of the problem here on Planet Me. Technology that always reflects ourselves back onto ourselves inevitably gives us a warped image of our selves.

Not that there's anything at all wrong with digital home movies. The problem is thinking that a digital version of any event is a "recovery" of that event. A lot goes into the making of the present moment. Representations of that moment, regardless of how sharp the images or how well-edited, are not the moment itself, but at best a short-hand that reminds us of that moment.

Have you ever listened to a recording of yourself, and cringed? Or gone back years later and watched a movie that scared the bejesus out of you when you saw it as a kid only to find that in actual fact it had unbeleivably bad acting, a laughable plot and totally lame effects? Have you ever scribbled down your most profound revelations while tripping your balls off, only to look at them later and find little more than chicken scratchings? But for a moment, I had it! The Theory of Everything!

The profoundest moments of our lives often suffer when we try to capture and codify and catalogue them. Because memory is not rigid. It's not systematic. Memory is closer to dreaming. And were we able to record our dreams and watch them in our waking lives we would likely be less impressed by them than we'd expect to be. We need to be in the dream—of the dream—our subconscious minds switched on—in order to experience the dream. Watching it conscious, once the novelty wore off, would be about as compelling as babysitting a babbling paranoid scizophrenic. I've done it. Trust me, it's a big snore.

(It was back in college. Senior year, spring semester. A stressed-out classmate went off her anti-psychotic meds during finals. Not a great idea, if you're thinking about it. I was telling a friend of mine who's a psychologist about it recently. I said I was disappointed in how cliche all of my classmate's delusions turned out to be—once she was back on her meds, and after a little stay at Daisy Hills, she admitted as much herself, God love her, poor soul. So I was telling my friend, it was all "Satan" this, and "God" that, and there was a thing about the mother ship landing, and did I want to come along, and if I did to remember not to forget the crate of grade-A extra fancy fruit from the Fruit-of-the-Month Club the UPS guy had just delivered so that we'd have something to snack on on the way. I was like, "blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda. Come on, you can do better than that. I mean, this is straight out of The Idiot's Guide to Paranoid Schizophrenia, here. Chapter One: God's talking to you. Chapter Two: aliens are beaming shit into your brain. Chapter Three: government's listening in. It’s like, can’t you at least come up with something original?" To which my psychologist friend replied, quite simply: "It’s not really about originality." I was like, Oh, uh, yeah. I guess you're right. But still boring as all hell.)

I get the feeling that what scientists are contemplating when they talk about "getting those moments back"—as if they had been stolen from us—by time? By our subconscious minds?—rather than simply integrated into our whole experience in a much more complex way than our strictly conscious minds can grasp—what scientists are thinking of is something like "the vision machine" in Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World, a device that allows memories and dreams to be recorded as they are experienced and transferred from one person's brain to another's, wreaking all appropriate havoc in the process.

To be sure, there's a kind of hubris in colonizing the past—even our own pasts. There's a sort of naive faith in the accuracy of memories—if we can capture the data, then we've captured the memory. Sometimes this is important — in the case of an accident or a crime, for example, or the details of a gentleman's agreement. But the memories that mean the most to us change with age—and the change reveals what is the essence of the memory at any other given moment. It's never mere information. Can the totality of any subjective experience — and is there any other kind of experience?—be captured in an algorithm? Is emotion quantifiable? (It's a real question.)

This is why we have art and poetry and music, isn't it? Because the realm of experience is only partially about bits and bytes. One of my favorite contemporary philosophers, Thomas Nagel, recently wrote about science's limitations in a review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion for The New Republic [$]. Nagel thinks that "the impulse to find an explanation for everything in physics has over the last fifty years gotten out of control." He goes on:

The concepts of physical science provide a very special, and partial, description of the world that experience reveals to us. It is the world with all subjective consciousness, sensory appearances, thought, value, purpose, and will left out. What remains is the mathematically describable order of things and events in space and time.

It's no surprise that computer geeks would think it was a gee-whiz kind of cool thing to create a real-life "vision machine," of course. The wider question is why we all feel this compulsion to conquer time, instead of allowing it to teach us. I say, wei wu wei all the way, baby.

Anyway, what's wrong with Super-8 Kodachrome? How the sepia seeped in, and when you watched it it felt like a memory? Some things technology can't improve on, and super-8 film stock's one of them.

In other news: apparently the internet has "reached a milestone." Someone's estimated there are now over a hundred million sites on the web. Woo-hoo! Never mind that all but about twelve of them are utter shite. I mean, there are about three hundred thousand devoted to cats who know how to flush a toilet, alone.

Well, the more the merrier, I guess.