HOW WE DISAPPEAR

What we leave behind.

Mullaney, a Stanford scholar who has written four books on Chinese history and technology, describes himself as “a historian interested in how things disappear.” Jolted by his father’s death, he seeks understanding with a historian’s tools, peering through an archival lens. In the process, he takes us on a deeply moving philosophical journey, exploring the physical evidence we leave behind as we transit through our lives. Short, quickly flowing chapters are packed with closely observed details on human traces drawn from broad swaths of research in photography, biology, physics, and cultural studies. The connecting thread is entropy, in all its forms, throughout history. Wax cylinders from Thomas Edison’s day can’t be played on a phonograph, which would ruin them. New techniques to digitize their surfaces recover the sounds, yet digital files are also on a path to entropy. Mullaney explores the many forms of information objects orbiting our lives—birth and death certificates, sonograms, family photos freezing a moment in time, genetic profiles—all reflections of aspects of experience, yet are frozen, limited, and partial views that fail to capture most of the intimate human experience. Simply digitizing physical archives, a monumental task, will not prevent their entropy. Mullaney invokes Internet pioneer Vint Cerf, who believes much of the contemporary record is housed in “destined-to-disappear platforms such as Slack, Gmail, Facebook DM, and more.” Some analogies may strike readers as a stretch—comparing airbrushing someone out of a photo to ghosting them on social media, for example—but most are memorable, even visceral, visualizations of the many forms of disintegration. Mullaney’s archival explorations are ultimately comforting, reconnecting him to his family and the world.

A fascinating tour of the unexpected traces of our passage through the world, and the persistent forces that erase them.