How We Disappear: Information in Life and in Death

When Stanford historian Thomas Mullaney “lost” both his parents, he began thinking of how information—all the stuff that makes us, that we make, and that we leave behind—ultimately disappears. The information that makes up our lives, from mundane official documents, poignant family photos, and sentimental artifacts to the cues embodied in our genes, both defines us, and inevitably decays, no matter the medium. Everything that we put “in formation” eventually collapses into randomness. Never is this more evident than in the wake of a parent’s death. Yet from all these elusive, even evanescent, data points, history is written and a future is made. Mullaney's new book about these ideas is called How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information . He'll be joined in conversation by Tamara Kneese, whose 2023 book Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond provides an ethnographic and historical account of the internet of death. Kneese is now a Senior Research Scientist at Partnership on AI . Previously, she led Data & Society Research Institute’s Climate,…