Ubiquitous Information and History
Stross writes, "And what a mass of information it will be. For the first time ever, they'll be able to know who was where, when, and what they said; just what words were exchanged in smoky beer halls 30 years before the revolutions that haven't happened yet: who it was who claimed to be there when they founded the Party (but didn't join until years later): and where the bodies are buried.
They'll be able to see the ephemera of public life and understand the minutiae of domestic life; information that is usually omitted from the historical record because the recorders at the time deemed it insignificant, but which may be of vital interest in centuries to come.
For the first time ever, the human species will have an accurate and unblinking, unvarnished view of its own past as far back as the dark ages of the first decade of the 21st Century, when recorded history "really" began."
I take his point. But I'm a bit of a skeptic.
First, I remember an episode of the series Babylon 5 which turned on the main characters being able to query their data banks for the 19th Century street address of Jack the Ripper. That reflected a confidence not just in the data collection of the present, but of the future's capacity to collate all information about all past eras and make them readily available to any user with a simple natural-language query. No matter how capacious the data storage and processing capabilities of the future, you won't be able to search for information that never existed in the first place. Nor, without the advent of extremely sophisticated AI (which I think we should not assume is inevitable) will any user (historian or otherwise) be able to search for any information with a simple natural language query. Now and for the foreseeable future, to find something out about the past, you'll have to know something about that past before you search--the basic Catch-22 of research.
That Catch-22 is not relieved by ubiquitious information. In fact, its contradiction becomes fiercer and fiercer the more information we can readily access. If Stross is right, and much of the quotidian information about life in our times that historians can only guess at with regard to past eras will be accessible, making historical knowledge from that vast array of information will become more challenging, not less. The Stasi of East Germany had an astonishing range of information about the people of East Germany, so much so that in many ways they effectively knew less than many less totalitarian states do about their populations.
Stross is riffing to some extent off what David Brin has called for in his book The Transparent Society: a society where all information is available to all queries. My problem with Brin's scenario is that I think both the recording and accessing of information is likely to remain asymmetrical and unequal in even the most comprehensively "transparent" informational order that I can plausibly imagine. Maybe my life will be available in all its details to a 23rd Century historian. I doubt that the interior deliberations of the White House will be. I doubt that the meetings of insurgent cells in Iraq will be available for study. Power will find a way to evade the informational net when it needs to. And when information makes power (or confounds it), there will be every reason for people to create informational noise, to deceive not just the present but the future.
It may be that 23rd Century historians of everyday life will be in a dramatically better situation when they study the 21st Century: they won't have to guess about what we ate, about what our sex lives were like, about everything we did and thought. Or maybe not. Right now I know that many people watch "The Simpsons". I can only guess about what they think about "The Simpsons" when they watch it, whether they get all the jokes that I get and in the ways in which I get them. Knowing what people do doesn't relieve you of the extraordinary difficulties involved in knowing what it means that they do it. Even asking people directly, "What does that mean to you?" doesn't relieve you of that burden, in part because meaning doesn't have a final resolution. Consciousness is not part of the datasphere of the 21st Century, at least, not yet.
Lack of information is not really the biggest problem that historians face. History does not become more scientific, authoritative, powerful or persuasive as it approaches eras that are more and more dense in information.