Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading

was built was recently uncovered.
    I’m surprised that remnants of the ancient wonders have persisted for millennia, and I’m encouraged, because if brute stone can survive, surely a digitized person can survive, as well. We should all be able to float down the eons in a Pharaonic funeral boat, immortal in a way that the ancient Egyptians could never dream of.
    Perhaps I’m in an elegiac mood these days, but I wonder what would prompt people to build a digital version of themselves. Could I build a digital monument to myself, a digital Mausoleum of Halicarnassus? Would it be something that merely baffles my friends and family, or would it live on as a testament to a madman’s desire for immortality, as mad as the Pyramids or a forty-foot-tall silver statue of Zeus?
    Could a version of my digital self become a companion for people in the future, a confidante, someone they could talk to? Could my digital self gradually learn from itself or others and subtly reprogram itself in the same ways that I myself might? Will there be a place where digital personas can congregate together, some digital mortuary grounds or Second Life where they can talk about who they once were or argue about ideas?
    I’m not sure. But I’ve got the mad Pyramid-architect desire to try and find out, to see what happens, one way or the other. A digital self, if it can avoid bit rot, is a kind of immortality. It’s the oldest dream of them all, the Faustian dream of living long enough to know and observe everything. Except that there’s no devil in this Faustian pact—or at least, no devil that I’m aware of yet.
    In the telling of the story, the devil granted Faust all the knowledge he wanted, with the catch that his soul would one day be claimed by the devil. The knowledge was limited only by death, which of course explains the motivation for Faust to cheat the devil and live on. Sadly, in both Christopher Marlowe’s and Johann Goethe’s versions of the story, Faust inevitably dies.
    His tale is ultimately a moral one, the message being that we can’t live forever. We can’t come to know everything. And that’s fine. I know I won’t live forever. My body and mind are frail, just like yours, like everyone’s. But that’s okay. Because surely through my digital self, I’ll live on—right?
    And this, in fact, is the final digital frontier. The digitization of memories and minds themselves. It might take a hundred years before the heirs of Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs figure out how to digitize human brains and make them available for purchase and download. But once that happens, it would be an amazing experience to download the personality of your deceased grandmother and to speak to her for a few hours. Or perhaps you could have a conversation with yourself as you once were. Or speak with any of the great minds of history and have a dialogue with them or argue with them.
    For example, I’m reading a classic sci-fi book now called Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick, and I’m stunned at how good it is. If I could download the author’s personality and start talking to him about his book, I’d feel overjoyed. The closest I can come now is to talk to other readers or post to the dead author’s Facebook fan page, but it’s clearly not the same as a genuine conversation with the author.
    Of course, in all likelihood, the minds of wealthy entertainers or technology early adopters will be digitized first. Theirs will be the minds available a hundred years from now as public domain recordings for people to download for free. And while theirs will be the first minds to be digitized, the quality will be poor, like that of wax cylinders or early ebooks.
    Though created with the best that technology could once offer, they’ll eventually be seen as grainy, more lo-fi than other hi-fi brains available for download later in the future, so they’ll be relegated to public domain archives that hardly anyone ever visits, the equivalent of the Department of Special Collections at the University of California. And who knows, maybe Jeff Bezos will convert one of his data centers into a building to house his digital brain. Heck, if I had the money, I would do this too.
    You don’t have to take my word for this; you can read any contemporary sci-fi book to see the same insights and impulses toward living digitally in a disembodied way. Because these ideas are now part of our culture’s currency. But for now, you and I are as analog as it gets.