E No basis Library of Alexandria in 288 BC, Alexander the Great entertained the project maintain any crazy the knowledge of mankind since the invention of writing in Sumer and Babylon. Under the Roman Empire at the height of his glory, the wonder of the ancient world had up to 700,000 volumes on papyrus and parchment ... before being destroyed and plundered by the Christian disciples of the last Ptolemy in the year 642 as reported by the recent peplum Agora . Scientists and philosophers were expelled and all the memory went up in smoke, plunging the world into the scientific and intellectual eclipse of the late Middle Ages. At the time zero backup copy was available ... But
fifteen centuries later, the quantum leap technology enabled by the digital revolution would almost palpable the dream to keep forever the memory of every human being born on this Earth!
The man is dust and will return to dust, but his memories will remain etched on silicon in a quest for eternity so human. The Pharaohs and Alexander dreamed ... Microsoft will do . It is in all cases the project crazy Gordon Bell, a veteran researcher of the firm that started in 1998 to digitize all of his writings and archive hard drive every day of his life by photographing, scanning, recording methodically everything he saw, ate, read, or felt. Called "MyLifeBits" ("pieces of my life"), this futile attempt to build an e-book has become a memory , just released in France by Flammarion under the title "Total Recall" . Of course an allusion to the Paul Verhoeven film adapted from a story by the great Philip K. Dick ( "We Can Remember it For You Wholesale" ). Except that in the film, the company sells Rekall false memories implanted in her memory to its customers. While Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell claimed his assistant help you build your own electronic memory with a real manual : "Imagine that you have access with a single click, all information received during your life" , summarizes the inevitable Bill Gates, who prefaces the book.
METHOD AND lifelogging But before we get there, so you'll need:
1. equip the gear you need (computer, scanner, smartphone by camera-video-GPS ...)
2. scan and save maniacally all your records (address books, administrative documents, photographs, books read, music listened to, exchanged emails etc ...)
3. convert you (and your family, your employer etc ...) to "lifelogging" , namely the continuous recording of your day as photos, audio, video, golf GPS ...)
4. And this is not the least tedious carefully organize your e-memory " by classifying the tree while following a chronological perfect.
brief explanation in this promotional video made in Microsoft
O ui imagine something crazy that prevents you from living your life finally , taste the moment, to savor the delicate moment of happiness caress of sun on your face the first day of spring as you will be too busy to shoot the first buds on trees, these kids playing in front of you, this cluster of young girls in flower, while talking to himself to save your note- impressions! Who has not experienced the feeling of missing the moment to force too much to want to capture a picture or video? Course Gordon Bell promises to soon be automating this tedious process backup memorial to force miniature camera incorporated into clothing, GPS integrated with your favorite portable device to faithfully reproduce your impressions and feelings, retrace your not less. But in fact what all this? What will it really be this mass of memories digital? The author admits he stored 261 gigabytes on its CPU , plus a hundred more gigabytes on external servers ... more than it would take to save Alexandria Library devoted to one man, so brilliant is he? Is not that a bit vain and pathetic? Except to make a happening art and politics as Hasan Elahi, who wrongly suspected of terrorist activities in the United states, has decided to save his life by life-logging. An activist gesture in the shape of snub to surveillance which is the object. Read here Owni .
BECOME CRAZY FOR NOSTALGIA
E a digital souvenir t is really a true keepsake to treasure? The feeling of a nice round pebble rolling in your hand in memory of a romantic weekend with the woman in your life ... is that it can be digitized? Does it fit on a USB stick? And then how to manage this great mass of data without forgetting ... or mad with longing, haunted by the past, unable to live the present moment ? In a recent review devoted to the book "Total Recall", "The World" deals with the news of Borges' Funes the memory "or how a young man accidentally acquires the gift of total memory and loses his mind, incapable of thinking and living his life to this while managing endless memories ...
A to work in memory, yes, of course. But not on an industrial, robotic, dehumanized ... In this recent post, "Gone With our images" , I told my nostalgia Photo film which required him to choose carefully the moment, the pose, exposure, shutter speed to make the cliché that you remember will smile again in 20 years: "We took pictures to keep the memory of a bubble of happiness spatiotemporal , leaving a testimony of our fragile existences, transmit family memory, witness of history being done ... well smile at life and say shit to death ... " . Today it is not the same, things change, things change as Boris Vian in singing the "Lament of Progress " "Take not one, but ten but a hundred photos without thinking . The pass in a few seconds of a digital camera or a smartphone on a computer screen, a tablet or a television. Scroll lazily from hundreds of pictures stored on your PC, check what we like, touch the plate as a surgeon photoshop image, broadcast a drunken one-night holiday memory or a network with a click and forget it immediately ... " . m'autocite Pardon me again.
E-MEMORY AND transhumanity
But all his smug scientism geek, Gordon Bell scans, zap almost all of these questions: "Total Recall will change the fact of being human. Eventually, the advent of this program will be al for next generation an important change that the digital era has been for our ", he predicted. And we're off in the delirium of the creepy "transhumanity" comparison to Google, Microsoft's worst enemy ... there is no chance. "What we're trying to do is build a humanity increased, we build machines to help people make better things they can not do much (...) Google wants to be the third hemisphere of your brain, " prophesied recently the firm's boss, Eric Schmidt. I was talking about in this post.
Worse author, who says he got the idea of "MyLifeBits" to "completely get rid of the paper " downright begs the central question of the possibility of e-surveillance of our lives digitized by the state and its police pseudopodia Surveyors Net: "How Not to worry, for example, that the government spying on us through our e-memories?" , wonders he blandly. How indeed does not fear being fliquer into our privacy memorial already when surveillance cameras scrutinizing our cities and our lives as so many prying eyes (see map of 1300 provided new cameras in 2011 in Paris on Owni )?
fossilized MY LIFE?
E does well Gordon Bell and his co-author Jim Gemmel do not fear "Big Brother" and "Brave New World". Normal they work for Microsoft. They promise hand on heart a "Little Brother" would each of us: "democratic face of a global surveillance society in which the recording means, instead of being in the hands a single central authority, are shared among millions of individuals ". You bet Charles I prefer to keep my memories for me . And if possible as real things analog : a photo taken in Paros in the Cyclades was 1990 when a blue Klein slap on the blue the whiteness of the whitewashed houses, the roller round Etretat I mentioned above pleased and a sprig of lavender picked one day in the mountains by my eldest daughter, a lock of blonde hair of her younger sister ... and so many other tangible things, exhaling a perfume of sweet nostalgia a moment of happiness, grace and love that never digitization can not express other than a pale shadow copy.
"After your death, the corpus of information and made even allow the creation of a 'you' virtual. Your digital memories and traits of your personality as a fossilized form an avatar with which future generations will talk ", fantasize authors. Or how to access the very human desire for immortality, the old dream of Alexander and Pharaoh, the circle is complete. For my part, I do not know if I want to finish as a hologram 3D drooling methodically fossilized my life in a digital cemetery. I think I'd rather leave things to me like a treasure hunt , writings, photos, videos way puzzle . exhumed patiently, surely not with one click. If anyone is interested in one of my descendants or anyone else. And if tomorrow importantly, it still has the patience to give the time to time memories ...
Jean-Christophe Féraud
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