Attention Historians of the Future

24 MB MP3

Chris’s Billboard

Surely you’ve wondered: what is it from the flotsam and jetsam of our everyday lives that’s going to reveal us to the archaeologists of 3005. Our patio furniture will tell a lot about our materials, our barbecue sociability, our outdoor leisure habits; the way we handle our laundry will also tell a story. Also the podcasts in which people are leaving ideas, for what they’re worth, but also accents, phrasing, unintentional context as fascinating to the future as the handwriting or watermarks on a letter home from the Civil War. Make it a first rule that it’s very very hard to tell what is going to leap out as interesting in a hundred or a thousand years. And then consider in a life drenched in information, what part of it will really inform and document the way we live now. On Open Source: The archives of our time, including the digital trail we’re leaving behind.

Jason Scott

Podcasting Archivist

Blogger, ASCII

[in studio in Cambridge]

Grant McCracken

Anthropologist

Blogger, This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology & Economics

[in studio in Cambridge]

David Shapiro

Artist

Trash Collector

[by phone from New York]