This is an important book when we survey the extent of our collective memory. We are going beyond libraries and museums to a more widespread but tenuous digitalization. Much more data is being collective, but cannot process it all, and we are not storing info on assuredly permanent devices or storage units. Rumsey does a fine sweep of the history of intellectual thought, book collecting and libraries. She grapples well with most of the issues, makes us aware, but does not give solutions which are not forthcoming as yet. ( )

There are some fine insights throughout When We Are No More. Materialism sets us apart from all other beings. No one else can look back at their ancestors, examine long dead civilizations or evaluate fossils. We think we’re the only beings who evaluate a sight with our knowledge of the past and our expectations for the future. Only humans collect artifacts to stimulate memories. Without our memories, we are nothing.

Rumsey says we get “information inflation” every time we invent a new process. Starting with the Sumerians 5000 years ago, data storage has been problematic. The invention of photography in 1838 changed everything in the memory field. So did digitization. So did the democratization of authorship.

We face a disaster of scale. Until recently, no one preserved much of anything for the future. Yet museums and libraries are bulging with the “few” artifacts we have collected. Now that we actively collect data (and nothing seems insignificant), and we are suddenly seven billion, the data situation becomes untenable.

We are reluctant to ditch any data, because we never know when it might prove useful. Rumsey gives a number of examples, like 70 year old glass plate negatives from an astronomic observatory being used to prove theories that came about more recently. Or old ships’ logs reconstructing weather patterns and biodiversity reduction. Data storage is not memory any more than data is knowledge; it’s what you make of them. And if you don’t have any to begin with….

Rumsey spends a lot of time telling us that digital data is fragile. By that she means it will be unreadable very shortly, as new platforms, protocols, and software make them useless. But she missed the real fragility of digital data – magnetism. All those digits are calmly aligned under the umbrella of the magnetic field, currently centered near the North Pole. But every 100,000 years, the magnetic field reverses. This hasn’t been a data problem until now, but when it happens next it will be a gigantic degaussing of Earth. Everything aligned through magnetism will be corrupted if not erased. And we are 700,000 years overdue for a pole reversal. So digital data is far more at risk than everything that has come before, right back to Sumerian clay tablets so prized as the first data storage devices.

All the action in When We Are No More takes place in the last fifty pages, but it is a plea to preserve as much as possible for the future, and make it freely available - hardly radical thought. The first 150 pages are a historical recap of the Sumerians, Thomas Jefferson’s libraries, and other efforts to preserve data over our short history, interspersed with the highlights above. It doesn’t imagine what such a future might look like or how we get there. It barely touches on personal data and social media. Privacy and the right to be forgotten don’t appear. Rights to private data are not dealt with. Nor are survivor rights. The title implies a much stronger book than this is.

David Wineberg ( )