The Archive
Essays on genealogy, permanence, and the record of who we are. Why your family tree shouldn’t live on rented land, and what a record built to last actually looks like.
July 1, 2026 · 6 min read
Ancestry, MyHeritage and Facebook hold the record of your family on land you rent by the month. When the rent stops, the record can vanish. Here is why that is a design flaw, and what a permanent alternative looks like.
Read →July 4, 2026 · 7 min read
Humanity keeps gathering its memory into one place, and one place keeps burning. The pattern is older than the internet, and the fix is not a better building.
Read →July 8, 2026 · 6 min read
People ask which magic technology makes something last forever. There isn't one. Durability is a relay race, and understanding that changes how you protect anything you care about.
Read →July 11, 2026 · 6 min read
Social networks count accounts, and accounts are cheap to fake. A record of humanity has to count people. Here is the difference, and why it changes everything about trust online.
Read →July 14, 2026 · 5 min read
Every archive humanity has ever kept has been kept on one planet. That is one point of failure for the entire species. The fix is not science fiction.
Read →July 16, 2026 · 7 min read
They ruled for 165 million years and left us bones we had to guess at. Not one of them left a name. Here is what actually happens to you when you die, and the one way a life stops being lost.
Read →July 16, 2026 · 6 min read
Forty thousand years ago a human pressed a hand to a cave wall so someone later would know they were here. The wall was the technology. It worked. This is the same act, on a wall that does not erode.
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