The core of the digital heirloom

It’s taken me years to realize this one obvious fact:

I am the best case study for what I’m trying to do here.

Yes, the digital heirloom project is my offer to everyone who wants to establish a footprint on the internet without resorting to AI slop machining and using a “spray and pray” approach. It’s also my own way of doing the whole “build in public” ball that everyone likes to toss around.

As I’m going through all the content I’ve written, I’m beginning to realize what the phrase “write to yourself from [x time period ago]” can really mean when you have AI to assist you in trolling through all the stuff that you’ve created.

I’ve recently begun to tinker with NotebookLM…interesting stuff. The sheer amount of material that you can just dump into it and use as a resource is immense, and I’m going to add it to my system as I learn more about it.

This is the last of this series on self-expression and its importance in creating your digital heirloom.

Let’s bite into this tasty final tidbit: no matter what it is that you create to express yourself, it’s part of your digital heirloom.

Your footprint is larger than you realize

Do you journal?

Do you write, doodle, sketch, vlog, take notes, or write emails?

It’s impossible not to in this day and age, and everything you’ve done has some sort of impact somewhere. Your parents may have the largest portion from your childhood. You most likely have the lion’s share of your college and yuppy work in the form of your email account and stacks of old notebooks from your education experience, regardless of your level. If you have children, just about all of your records for them are in your phone as well as little bits and pieces of their arts and crafts.

This cycle repeats itself with each generation with one profound difference for the current one:

It’s possible to capture a person’s entire life from start to finish on the internet now.

One thing my family and I love to do is to troll through Google Photos and relive all the moments that we’ve captured together, especially for our children. I can pull my phone right now and show my kids their first moments from their birth to their latest antics from earlier today. It may raise my blood pressure and drive me nuts for an hour or two, but I keep enough of my wits about me to document the evidence for future blackmail…uh…reflection.

For my parents to do the same, they’d have to look for a VHS deck to hook up to the TV, and that’s becoming increasingly difficult to do as that technology fades into irrelevance, not to mention the tape material itself is slowly deteriorating.

Digital archiving is becoming an artform as we start our own Brainiac projects for our parents. Old paper documents, photo albums, and pieces of our past that we want to preserve and pass on to future generations are becoming a big business for those who keep old technology in working order.

From the oldest 5-inch floppy drives to zip drives to CDs to USBs to memory sticks, all manner of digital storage requires consolidation to a solid state drive and to a server to be copied in triplicate. For physical objects that we can’t keep from the ravages of time, it’s possible to scan them to re-print in both 2D and 3D.

That’s probably overkill…the thing that I’m most interested in is the pairing of the image of the object with the stories that it brings to mind.

The digital heirloom project is one that enables us to construct our own curated museum of artifacts; a repository that could be connected and accessed, easily searched and queried with the help of AI someday.

This is a companion to your life

We’ve taken a few days to explore the importance of self-expression in all its various forms and why it matters.

To create is to be human. We all desire to leave a legacy, to make our “dent in the universe” as Steve Jobs once quipped. We have something to say that we believe is fundamentally unique for our experiences in our lives that we wish to preserve and pass on after we’re gone.

My father’s recent brush with death highlights this fact. After his heart attack, my brother and I have been regularly driving back and forth across town to check in on him as my mother stays by his side. His office at home is both a treasure trove and an architectural dig site for decades of technology as well as mountains of VHS tapes and CDs…very much like my late Tai Chi master’s archive that he passed to me. There always seemed to be so much time yet for them to pass their knowledge on.

Now, there’s a sense of urgency.

Your digital heirloom is a combination of your self-expression and creativity and the previous generations that have shaped your views, beliefs, and values.

Everything is art

Take a look around you and browse through the work that you’ve done throughout your life.

Pick a piece to digital preserve or archive in some way. Use it to inspire you to write something about why you chose it. Share a story that is associated with it that connects it to you or a lesson that it taught you about yourself.

Imagine that it’s part of a museum collection of you that someone could visit. What would you say about that piece that is displayed like an artifact?

P.S.

As I’m writing these 7-day sets, I’m also drafting a bunch of other issues here that I’m taking more time to improve on as opposed to just spitting out the first drafts. Given recent events, I’m facing a few uncomfortable truths about myself and my tendency to push my limits…I have some decisions to make about this project.

For now, I’m going to post a few other thoughts that I’ve had before starting the next set.

When I do continue, we’ll discuss the written legacy and why documenting our lives matters.