Here’s a short inverview/profile thing I did recently for the “Good Question” series that the Kenan Institute for Ethics has been doing. There was a high-concept photo-shoot and everything, so if you’ve ever wanted to see me hanging around in a junkyard warehouse surrounded by various spare parts (I’m sure you see the connection here), then now’s your chance.
I’ve seen this kind of article many times but is it correct? I’d say that I’ve generated several million words in papers, newspaper articles, blog posts and so on since I got my first Mac in 1984 (a bit over 100kw/yr for 25+ years, for something like 3 million), and also attracted maybe 10 million more in blog comments (over 100k of non-spam comments. Of that, I’ve lost
* a fair bit of material I produced before 1990, when hard disk space was very expensive, and stuff had to be stored in various external disk formats. Sadly that includes my first econ theory book and a book of satirical songs I turned out in the 1980s. Mostly this was a case of physically losing, or accidentally overwriting, the data rather than possessing it, but being unable to read it any more.
* The first year or so of comments on my blog in the now-obsolete Haloscan system.
* The blog has also suffered a lot of linkrot, including internal links to its older incarnations
* A lot of my older text is in formats that can now only be read by extracting a text-only format, and some old stuff (eg pre .qif financial records) is in formats that are no longer readable in any way. But again, that’s mostly a problem with pre-1990 stuff.
Compared to my slightly obsessive desire to preserve every revision of every piece I’ve ever written, those are substantial losses. But compared to my paper records, my digital stuff is almost perfectly complete, not to mention instantly accessible and searchable.
I suspect that most people who want one have gotten one already. But in case any CT readers haven’t, and would like to try it out, click here to get one of the 150 invites I have to distribute …