We are the first generation of immortal people. And it’s all thanks to the web.
When each of us will die we may not be remembered as much as we want to but should the corporations keep their servers running and keep their promises to us, we’ll still exist in the cloud. And it’s remarkable. YouTube gets 24 hours of video uploaded every minute. That’s 1400 years worth of video EVERY YEAR. And out of all that information you can see our personality. It is who we are, our nephews will be able to read our rants and our blog posts and see our art.
Our immortality is undeniable because even though our websites may go down and our rich media deleted from bandwidth-starved servers, we will still live in the crawlers of the web. Google won’t forget our keywords, or our semantic linkups. Archive.org will preserve the stages of our websites and the way we expressed ourselves through the years.
It can therefore be said that our deaths will only be symbolic, after all we share so much of ourselves on the web that it’s not hard to piece together our personality, our feelings from the bits in the machines. In a way we will be as science fiction writers have been saying for decades, we will transcend our bodies and become beings of energy, existing through our remains on this ever-changing universe of the Internet.
And that’s why I’m sure that one day, our son’s sons and their son’s sons will be able to send more of their consciousness into the singularity and eventually live completely connected, forever. A kind of immortal collective telepathy, somewhat like the Borg, but differing in that our own personalities will remain intact, merely adding to the singularity and coexisting without melding into each other.
A little bit of weekend philosophy never hurts 
Have a great weekend!
Related posts: