I was swallowed by digital silence.
Step one: cut open your heart and bleed it on an empty page.
Step two: find some nostalgic pictures that capture shards of your soul. Add them to the page that you just bled on.
Step three: hit publish and sit in silence. Swallowed by silence.
That’s usually the feeling of most art. Drawing, blogging, embroidery. A war with a blank canvas, then the silent indifference. Kafka never knew acclaim, neither did van Gogh or hundreds of other aspiring artists, including this humble blogger.
But this can all change.
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It’s almost my daughter’s birthday. This, her third, is going to be the first without my grandmother. She passed in February and left no known writing or artistic work behind. Only our memories, and a short series of audio interviews that I did with her.
At least I can hear her laugh in those tapes. Her warm, infectious laugh. Childlike and pure to her last days.
I just wish I had more content of her. More tapes, journals, videos, security camera footage. Anything really.
In part because I can take those transcripts and have GPT turn them into a kids book about her life.
I can take pictures of her as a child and have them reanimated into that story. Capture Grandma’s biography in small visual tomes that my little girl can grow up with. To know her without knowing her.
And that’s just with a few fragments of tape.
But if I had more…
If I had more, I would be able to have AI write her whole biography. Details for generations to come. The incredible story of her evacuation from Ukraine as the Nazis marched east. Grandma, then a toddler, nearly succumbing to typhoid fever. A childhood of rations and hunger in Siberia. The great hope with the German defeat. Grandma, who would survive Stalin, the fall of the Soviet Empire, immigration. Who died 24 years into the next millennium, as a proud American. A grandma and great-grandma who was surrounded by love, to her very last moments. Who mysteriously healed a family wound in her literal last breath.
If I just had more raw data…!
One day with a few small AI advancements, I could feed it into GPT 6 and have it create a documentary or a TV show based on her life. Take her pictures and turn them into videos, even using her own voice to narrate the story.
A riveting story for generations of our family.
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Go back a generation before Grandma, and I know virtually nothing about them, and have almost no one left to ask. A few disassociated sepia photos.
Gone but for the few lines of genetic code that helped make me.
I am them, but they are a forever mystery to me.
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Then it hit me: maybe it doesn’t matter if no one’s reading now?
Maybe my words aren’t meant for today. On a long enough timeline, who knows? Maybe someone will stumble upon them—a future grandchild, perhaps—searching for a connection, looking to understand who I was, who they are. Who was this quirky magician in their lineage?
Future generations could use my writing to recreate pieces of me. Not just words on a page but something more. A hologram chatbot, a digital ghost that speaks in my voice. The video game of Vlad of Prague in 2007. Or Vlad as a new dad in 2020.
Imagine that—a connection of souls across time. A relative, long after we’re gone, talking to a version of us pieced together from these disparate shards of self.
You just need enough bits to feed the machine.
Data. Capture yourself, your biography, your quirks, your insecurities. Voice notes, sheet music, dance videos. Capture them all in any format, because format won’t matter. It’ll all be blended into something that we don’t understand.
So maybe it’s not about the audience right now. Maybe it’s about a bigger picture. On a long enough time horizon, our words and scraps of self could matter in ways we can’t even imagine.
It’s not hits, subscribers of followers. It’s about leaving behind something that might help create meaning to future generations.
That’s why we should keep going and keep hitting publish. Forget the silence today. Scream loudly and imperfectly, for posterity’s sake.
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