I don’t remember what prompted it, but I asked on Discord the other day: **What happens to our Steam libraries when we die?** I thought about, when I die, I’d love to “pass down” my video games to my siblings; what does that look like in the twenty-first century? When someone died in 2000, their siblings, kids, and friends likely would have inherited books, tapes, CDs, magazines, photo albums — all of the media this person collected, loved, and created. If that same person died today, so much of that media would be relegated to the cloud. Books would be in their Kindle account. Movies — if they even owned any — would likely live on platforms like Amazon; otherwise, you’d just have a list of “previously watched” on Netflix. No more CDs when you have Spotify. There might be some magazines, but they might also be digital. Photo albums live in Google, iCloud, or Dropbox. This sucks. First, your media becomes inaccessible when you stop paying to store it, since [[{2.1b} we accumulate so much, but we own very little]]. Your next of kins could probably export your photos, but what about your favorite movies? Can your kids watch old re-runs of your favorite show without paying for Netflix forever? Second, our media is siloed in our individual accounts. They can share your playlists in their own Spotify accounts, I guess, but what about your favorite books? They’re locked in your eReader. Your games are attached to your Steam account. Do they have multiple accounts now, just to keep your [[media memory]] alive? Do they let it go? And, most importantly to me, there is no element of surprise!!! No one is going to stumble upon a box of risky, unlabeled tapes, only to find that they’re home movies or static-filled recordings of your favorite childhood films. They won’t find a book on your nightstand that you were reading the night before you passed. They won’t find a beloved CD you’ve been looking for for ages, stuck in the crack between your car seat and center console. What becomes of us when there is no physical record? What is there left to remember us by? What is the new ephemera that we’ll leave behind? # the final death in the 21st century | [[2023-02-01]] --- There’s a pretty famous quote that essentially says we don’t really die until someone says our name for the last time: >“There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.” > >- David M. Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives It may not be the *final* death, but I think there’s a fourth death somewhere in there: the last time someone logs into your accounts online. I’m being a cheeky, but only kind of: without the ephemera of our lives, so much of who we are, what we do, and what we consume lives online. There’s something kind of tragic about your accounts being abandoned… And there’s something even *worse* about the thought that your email account will continue to ping and ping and ping, until the end of time — some kind of time — with promotional emails, long after you’re in the grave. >[!trailhead]- trails >⬇️ [[{2.1a} the essence of the everyday]] >