About this episode

Alex Murshak interviews Thomas S. Mullaney about his book on the fragility of information and the nature of historical memory.

I sit down with Thomas S. Mullaney — professor of modern Chinese history and the history of technology at Stanford, Guggenheim Fellow, and director of Stanford's Program in Science, Technology & Society — to discuss his new book, How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information (W. W. Norton). It's his eighth book and first with a trade press, following The Chinese Typewriter and The Chinese Computer, and it turns from how information comes into being toward how it degrades, collapses, and disappears. Our conversation begins with the ordinary ways the past is lost — not fires or catastrophes, but the everyday decisions that quietly erase records, like a family clearing out a box of irreplaceable papers after a death. Mullaney sets this against entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, and his argument that you can't hack your way out of decay — you can only slow it down. We discuss his central thesis for the digital age: that digitization is not preservation. Mullaney explains why magnetic and optical media are among the most fragile formats ever made, why even Stanford has digitized only one to two percent of its archives, and why he'd rather see institutions invest…

People in this episode

Host: Alex Murshak

Guest: Thomas S. Mullaney

Topics covered

• information degradation
• history
• digitization
• memory
• entropy
• technology

Keywords

• information
• history
• digitization
• entropy
• memory
• technology
• preservation

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Stanford

Books & works: How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information, The Chinese Typewriter, The Chinese Computer

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