I think about this a lot, as my own #online record grows ever longer.

The #internet is full of ghosts of *myself*, and friends—some still in my life, most not, an alarming number who can never be again—caught at points of our lives when we were utterly different people. Hell, sometimes spambots still comment on my #LiveJournal posts, and I have to go see what they said, which brings the memories flooding back. Decades of #Usenet and #Slashdot floating around in the ether.

And yeah, it gets exponentially weirder when it's *everybody* who's left similar traces—which is probably close to half the world's population by now, if it hasn't already passed that point. I've been online for forty years or so, continuously for about thirty. Another such span of time, and a solid majority of people on the planet will have most or all of their lives self-documented in a detail that has never before been possible in human history.

My fiancée is a social #historian, focusing on a little over a century ago. There's lots of material, but never enough. So much is irretrievably lost. Her counterparts a century hence will have the opposite probem.

Probably a good thing those teenage #BBS posts are lost forever. Er, I think: maybe they're still on a stack of cassette tapes in someone's basement. If so, I hope they stay in their graves.