This is a fairly short post to make up for the Net Neutrality tome we dropped on you yesterday.  As I was struggling to log in to the site and post, I stumbled across an interesting article from 2013 entitled Digital Dust.  It was about how the author went about handling the digital effect of his brother who had been killed in a car accident and how that differed from others who were grappling with the same issue.  It really got me thinking. 

We chose the name Our Digital Dust precisely because we wanted to leave something behind for future generations, and with the, essentially, unlimited storage in cyberspace we figured this would be the best forum for us. What I started thinking about, though, was the incredibly huge pile of digital “dust” I track through my online life. 

From photos and files in the cloud to the frighteningly detailed Google has of my life, I realized I have created terabytes of footprints across the Internet that will be here long after I am gone.  More startling is that my generation is the last to not have our entire lives documented, tagged and sorted for easy access through a browser. The generations after me will not really understand a time where you didn’t have information on demand (unless you had a set of encyclopedias) and you really didn’t have the ability to know the most intimate, if not mundane, details of he lives of everyone around you.

As we have commented over the year, this wholesale embrace of technology is new, different, and has resulted in changes both good and bad. The only thing I know for certain is that it will continue to change and become more and more alien to me…unless Ready, Player One, becomes a reality, in which case, youmcan find me in a War Games simulation…