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I've kept up my cohost account, and a lot of days it feels like I don't know why. It's hard to find new people to follow. Sometimes I go tag spelunking, searching for something and seeing chosts people have associated with those terms. Other times, the process is more akin to luck, as chosts get shared into my feed, something written by a stranger splashed serendipitiously across my screen.
A lot of days my cohost feed is pretty empty, dependent on whether any of active-ish people I follow are doing anything that day. I myself occasionally post longform stuff, but more often pictures, short quips, etc. I joked a while ago that cohost feels like the unacknowledged child of tumblr and LiveJournal, and the past few months haven't proven me wrong.
But today one of the people I follow boosted a chost from thecommabandit into my feed. I stopped to read. I read it slowly, then I read it again.
Ruminations on archaeology and preservation, authority, effort, and capital, it asks how much from today will survive, what will be found; and what our descendents, thousands of years in the future, might make of our distant light.
As they point out, it used to be the case that elites were the ones who got to decide what was recorded, what had a chance to survive. The money to commission monuments or write books ensured that only some stories were told. In my own case, there's a branch of the family that, going back to medieval times, was particularly well-to-do. Landed. Wealthy. Yorkists (well, you can't win 'em all). I have a full family tree stretching back from the twelfth century to now, ending with me and my siblings. The other families I'm descended from, the ordinary ones, are not so lucky. A few records going back to the mid 19th century. Some stories. Nothing before. In one case, a great-grandfather who was a child soldier, who fought in the Boer and Great Wars. An orphan from London. Necessarily, everything before him an indecipherable shadow.
But education, particularly in the last hundred and fifty years or so, has changed things dramatically. Most of my ancestors were simple farmers or ne'er-do-wells. It's a good bet that few of them, if any, could even read. But the ability to read and write levels history dramatically: the powerful are still powerful, the rest of us required to labour, but the ability to write things down provides some slender chance to the rest of us that some part of our lives might be known in future.
Years ago, I read Anglo-Saxon literature as an interest in university. If you've only studied Latin, or Ancient Greek, you would be shocked at how little has survived of the northern European languages. Old English has a variety of poems and prose, but not a lot, the entirety of six centuries of life at the edge of the Atlantic preserved in just a few codices. Ink and vellum. The lucky texts those that survived fire or mold or neglect (or all three). And Old English is expansive, compared to its continental cousins. What remains of Gothic is some fragments of Biblical translation. Old Frisian is similarly scant. And yet these languages were spoken by thousands, by hundreds of thousands of people, each a dark, expressionless face about which we know nothing.
The democratization of writing over the past two centuries has meant that, for the first time in history, ordinary people have been able to tell their own stories in their own words. thecommabandit writes,
societies only expend effort to preserve things they thought were important, and only some people get to decide whats important. this is why weve found so many pictures of beaches but so few of offices, why archives are full of articles about billionaires but not factory workers, why youve seen so many websites in english but so few in basque. the elites of a society are the ones concerned with preserving their legacy – extending their power into the future – but everyday people are too busy with the burden and joy of existing to worry about that.
As much as I want to agree, I'm not so sure about that. Ever since I started writing down my life twenty-five years ago and putting parts of it online, I've been very cognizant of the fact that it's accessible. That it's public. Partially this is because I've had people find my writing who I wish hadn't; but also because of the understanding that by putting it online, it becomes some tiny part of our own overarching story.
thecommabandit is right: most people just want to happily live their lives. Most people don't think about the future, or if they do, it's not really beyond a generation or two. Writing is intrinsically a creative act, and not every person is creative. And that's fine.
But some people are going to write: blogs or diaries, maybe even letters; or, long, rambling emails to crushes and lovers and friends. Something impels them. And some of this will survive. Some of this will become some part of a record. I think, I hope, I'll always be one of those people. I'm not an elite. I have to get up every day and go to work, and I wonder if there'll be a world to retire to before I die.
I write things down because I need to, even if it's for an audience of none. I've still got HTML I wrote in the nineties. One of my first poems, from 1996. The truth is, if I keep writing, if many of us do, an alternative record emerges. That the early 21st century wasn't all about rocketing billionaires, software as a service, AI, genocide, or the clash between democracy and autocracy. Instead, we can tell a different story, one that isn't about the glories of kings and pharaohs, but which is delightfully more mundane. What we ate for breakfast. Who we loved. How we felt in the dying days of the world. Because if humanity is still around on this planet in a couple thousand years, our words might reach someone unexpected. In amongst all the things elites preserve - the treaties, the laws, the shining biographies - will be the stories we tell about ourselves. About others. And there's no guarantee any of it survives, but in the off chance it does, what is it you'd like to say?