Keep in mind that your descendents probably won’t care about a huge majority of what you leave them. Photos annotated with a date, time, people in them, and an explanation, maybe, but generally my generation hasn’t given a shit about the tonnes of books, music, photos, furniture, knick knacks, and antiquities bequeathed to us. It would be bizarre if our kids didn’t maintain that tradition.
Yup. My parents aren’t even in ill health, let alone dead, but we recently took all the old VHS tapes, including a lot of OTA recordings, and a significant number of DVDs, and dumped them. Recordings of talking with relatives got digitized, same way you’d keep family photos.
I have no expectation that people keep my junk. I’ll pass on a handful of stuff like identifying photos of people and places, but nobody wants or needs the 500 photos of my cat. Even I don’t want that many, but storage is cheap enough that I don’t bother to delete the useless ones.
but nobody wants or needs the 500 photos of my cat
You only have 500 photos of your cat? Is your camera broken? Got the cat yesterday?
I’m trying to curate a few hundred photos for my kids. I’ve written a couple of bios of relatives. I’d like to record something like a story for them. If they want to trash it, that’s fine, but at least there will be something meaningful for them if they want it.
Assuming it survives the climate wars. 🫠
My wife’s parents recently passed. It took months to slog through their stuff and my wife was over it only weeks in. She dumped so much but constantly fights with herself for both taking more than she wanted/needed to and yet less that what she feels she should have. We’ve told our daughter multiple times “our stuff May mean a lot to us, it doesn’t have to mean anything at all to you. If you don’t want it, never feel bad dumping/selling/letting it go.” Out of all the stuff we all collect in life just by living, barely anything has any sentimental value.
On one hand I’ve got a huge collection of photos and albums I’ve taken and collected. I’m trying to clear some out as I go… but I’m not looking forward to that process when my parents go. My dad’s an avid photographer and I know he has a few hundred thousand photos, most of which are near duplicates and he rarely cleans them up.
I think it would be interesting to have some kind of global archive. Even if descendants don’t care “now” has the potential to be the beginning of the best documented era in history. Historians would kill for photographs by random average people from any other time.
A lot of people thought that that’s what the Internet would be, but that’s obviously not the case. And I know the “right to be forgotten” is a thing, and deservedly so, but at some point you’re throwing out the wine with the amphora.
Doesn’t archive.org provide that?
In theory yes, but not a lot of people are uploading their family photo albums AFAIK.
No, we do have that. Social media is a gold mine for analysis, both for modern sociology and for future archaeology.
Pretty sure theyd love a literal metric shit ton of free and cracked content that fits ontop of their pinky nail.
My kids aren’t really interested in the movies I like. They actively avoid the music I listen to. I’ve gotten them copies of the books I love and they give up after a few pages. They get bored with the games I played as a kid.
My dad loves Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the Whole Earth Catalog, and Bruce Springsteen. I do not. If he wills me his copies, I will keep some out of guilt and then my kids will have to throw them away.
Just think. At least you can sell off those nick-nacks. What value is there in digital goods you don’t want?
Nobody wanted my grandparents collected crap. Or their photos. Or their books. I tried giving them away. I tried consignment. I tried posting them on Facebook. Most ended up in a landfill.
Hadn’t thought of it like that. I wish I could at least donate my digital library, though.
Yeah - I’m totally for full, real, actual ownership of digital stuff, and we should be able to give it away.
But I’d be surprised if my kids would be interested in more than a tiny fraction of it. Or anyone else, for that matter.
Thanks to capitalism, you don’t own most of that “digital legacy” and do not have the right to bequeath or transfer ownership for the vast majority of it.
You can take ownership of a lot of it. Thanks to GDPR, major platforms offer ways to export data like photos, videos, activity on their platforms, messages etc. Store locally first, avoid over reliance on online platforms for safekeeping your data.
Also, we need to fight to keep ownership of digital media while we still can. Buy movies and music on physical media so they keep making them. Buy physical books. Buy from DRM free platforms like GoG. As convenient as it may be, avoid over reliance on streaming services.
And of course, make backups of anything you care about. Only you can keep your data safe. Online services will only keep your data as long as they can exploit it to make money.
My digital legacy is going in the dumpster, unless somebody figures out how to break encryption that I’ve never shared the password for.
Probate can figure out the rest.
Share me it, ill tell my ancestors theres valuable secrets hidden within and theyl crack it with their quatum computers.
You’d be very disappointed. Most of it is stuff you can get off usenet yourself, and the rest is documents and pictures nobody cares about but me.
I’m lucky
I have no children, and never will
My family and I aren’t close
My fiancée and I met through the erotic content that I create, and all my friends are well aware of it
My image has already been shared far and wide (without my permission), so that ship has already sailed
I’ll be dead, and nobody will be worried about my digital legacy whatsoever
I know, however, that I’m very much the exception and not the rule
I’m just trying to figure out a way to keep my 20+ tb of Linux isos curated and still accessible.
I plan on being dead then, so do what you want with my digital wake.
Books, games, music should be willable, but they are not. That we allowed ourselves to reach this particular spot is just sad.
In 2017, I helped develop key recommendations for planning your digital legacy. These include:
- creating an inventory of accounts and assets, recording usernames and login information, and if possible, downloading personal content for local storage
- specifying preferences in writing, noting wishes about what content should be preserved, deleted, or shared – and with whom
- using password managers to securely store and share access to information and legacy preferences
- designating a digital executor who has legal authority to carry out your digital legacy wishes and preferences, ideally with legal advice
- using legacy features on available platforms, such as Facebook’s Legacy Contact, Google’s Inactive Account Manager, or Apple’s Digital Legacy.
A long time ago, I had the idea for a startup to keep digital material, including accounts, passwords, old documents, etc. in a digital vault that would be released to the next-of-kin when someone dies. It would also convert documents to newer formats so your old unpublished WordPerfect novel could be opened and read by the grandkids (should they choose).
Problem is, nobody would (or should) trust a startup with that material. This is stuff that should be around for many decades and most startups go out of business.
Bitwarden does all that. If you pay the subscription you get a GB of storage and delegate emergency access to other people.
Does Bitwarden have emergency delegation now? I’d been waiting for it
This is stuff that should be around for many decades
Should it? 99.99% of my email doesn’t need to be around for more than a few days, let alone decades. And that number will only go up when I’m dead. Really important stuff, like ownership titles, is on file in paper here in my house and with the relevant title agency.
A couple years ago, I would have agreed. Most of our email is junk. But nowadays, you can have an LLM digest and summarize it for you. That could also be a service the legacy system offers. Grandkids can just ask for a free-form search term without having to wade through everything.
I am putting it on my will that before I die all my social media has to be marked as being one of the first really stupid AI Agents.
