Legacy

In 2013, I was a jobless 19 year old with no plan. To fill the days, I was regularly volunteering at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge. It was a smaller charity at the time, but it still had loads of people donating all sorts of computing hardware and software. We accumulate all sorts of random stuff over our lives, and I think most people don’t want it to end up in a landfill. So whether it’s just an attic clear out, or the belongings of someone who had passed away, it could always be donated to the museum. I would spend some of my days at the museum going through the incoming hardware, cleaning it up, making sure it worked and before putting it onto the archival shelves for display, archiving or being sold.

Being Cambridge-based, we had a lot of Acorn gear coming through our doors. So much so there is (still, I think) an entire room dedicated to the Acorn BBC Micro. If you don’t know who Acorn are, they invented the ARM CPU architecture, which is used in basically every single thing you own.

Anyway, a family donated an Acorn Archimedes A3010 and a box of floppy discs. I checked out the hardware, it was in good knick, and after a quick wipe down looked just like the other ones we had. As part of the process, I didn’t normally check out unlabelled discs. Whenever I had, it was normally some random pirated software with the label "Ben's disc" or something (we should go back to sharing pirated software). For whatever reason, I was compelled to give a few discs a look. I didn’t know much about the Archimedes platform, so why not see what wonders could be found amongst the 3.5” plastic trays?

A couple of discs in, I found one which contained text files, all seemingly created by the previous owner. It was sporadic journal entries from the decade the owner had used the machine. CV’s he had created and sent off towards the end of his career working locally in tech. Notes created without a thought of a future interlopers intrusion. It was fascinating. A glimpse into someones life I would never have known about.

Out of curiosity, I looked the guy up on Google. His CV had his full name, his address, and an old URL of his. The first result was an obituary, he had died of cancer.

I have been thinking a lot about legacy the last few months. This blog post has been written, trashed, and written again, several times in the process of those thoughts.

In one version of it, we explored over a meandering 5000 words data exports from some of my accounts on popular services like Google, Twitter, Facebook. I contrasted that with some analysis of the AOL search data leak from 2006, wondering what happened to those people. I found 4 users in the data leak who had searched for “aortic dissection”, and we went through their searches with some Python to extract some meaning and insight. One of them had even searched for answers about the ticking noise of their new heart valve, which I matched with me searching for the same thing from my phone 11 days after my own heart surgery.

While I was inspecting these random American souls from early 2006, it dawned on me that I couldn’t find myself mirrored amongst them anywhere. I didn’t feel a connection to the person on the other side of the data. It was just data compressed into an unrelenting machine meant to produce more money. They might have been searching for same things as I was, but that didn’t mean anything as a person. I was trying to hallucinate a connection with someone who also Googled the colour blue 20 years ago.

For a long time, I have treated my digital data as hallowed, part of a legacy that we all leave behind. I don’t know why, it just felt like I should, and I have been making backups of my data for years onto cloud storage. So much of everything I have done since I was 13 has been recorded, that these bits and bytes should probably meant something. It clearly means something to these corporations or they wouldn't go out their way to collect it all in the first place. It wasn't until I looked at someone else's auto generated, collected data, that I realised my own was meaningless. It wasn't me.

A few weeks after going through the Archimedes, I was back in the museum and I noticed the same box of floppy discs on the floor. I carried about on with my day, doing bits and bobs, volunteer shit, which mainly consisted of organising things and putting them on the online content management system.

Closing time eventually rolled around after a hard day of typing software into a computer. As we were packing up to leave, I walked past the floppy discs again. We had thousands of blank/unmarked floppy discs already, probably more than the museum would ever need to go through in their lifetime. I don’t know why I did it, but I asked if I could take the box home. I had an excuse of just wanting some more floppy discs for my Amiga (the hobbies of an incredibly stable and adjusted 19-year-old). But in reality, I just had this niggling feeling that these discs shouldn’t just be wiped clean or thrown away.

I got home, and I tried to load one up on my computer using an emulator and a USB floppy drive. It didn’t work, and after an evening of trying, I gave up. I’m sure eventually I would get a hold of an A3010 and be able to load them properly again.

When I think about legacy, I think about leaving behind a part of yourself. I have thought about what a person would look at if I had died during my heart issues 18 months ago, and I find it pretty fucking bleak. My Spotify, YouTube history, etc don’t actually show who I am. They aren’t me really, they’re this filtered, algorithmic, non-human version of what a mega-corporation thinks I am. Because I liked one monkey tweet on Twitter they might think I just love gibbons.

3 years ago I started taking film photos. Like most things I do, I don’t quite know why. I guess it just felt like something real, tangible. At around the same time, I also upgraded my DSLR to a nice mirrorless camera and some expensive lenses to take some lovely crisp, digital photos with. A year later I had completely stopped using my digital camera, because it didn't feel like I was putting a part of me into the photos. They felt indistinguishable to the photos I quickly take everyday with my iPhone. I like that I can go back and hold the photos and negatives I took as a kid with my wee £5 disposable camera + development combo you got at Boots. They're real.

To complete this wanky image of myself, I have also got really into vinyl records. Not because they sound better or anything like that, but because I can hold them. They work as a great Pomodoro timer while I’m working (I really recommend that), and the aesthetics of listening to a good record are great. But when I die, they will be left behind, and someone can donate them or give them away, and a part of me, something I enjoyed and held, will move on. I’m going to start leaving little notes in the sleeve of every single vinyl I listen to with my brief thoughts on the record. For no reason other than to have that bit extra of me left behind. When I end up in a charity shop in 2040 and someone picks up Avril Lavigne’s Let Go, I’ll be about for the ride.

Ultimately it is nothing more than a vanity project for myself, deeming my life and personality to be of great enough importance for literally anyone to care. But I think it's pretty normal to want to be remembered. I still have those floppy discs, sat waiting in a box in the attic. I don’t think I will throw them away, despite the fact they are unreadable (without some effort) to me. There will be people who have passed away, whether too young to leave a legacy except with their the closest family, or too busy to know that they didn’t have the time to start leaving themselves behind, who will not be remembered. I don’t think I want to do that to floppy disc man. While I live, he does, and you don't know his name, but he gets to live on a wee bit in you now too.

I will be forgotten too, I am not naive to that. Maybe it’ll take a long time, maybe it won’t. But I know now that I won’t be remembered by the things corporations remember about me, but by the pieces of me I get to leave behind. Hopefully, it won’t be too much effort clearing me out of the house.

Thanks for reading that. I think the post lacks a coherent through line so it's a weird read. But after throwing away so much of this post multiple times to try and find a point that made sense, I felt I should just post it and move on.

This blog is a part of my legacy too I guess. It’s just some words online, but a small part of the reason I post here is so that when I do die I’ve kept a good chunk of words talking about myself. You won’t find out my favourite album, or hold my photos and see any notes or drawings I’ve made. But you’ll know a bit about someone who once was, whom you might remember for a week and then forget about later. That’s alright with me.