2024-07-18
5 分钟The Economist Hello, this is Alok Jha,
host of Babbage, our weekly podcast on science and technology.
Welcome to Editor's Picks.
We've chosen an unmissable article from the latest edition of The Economist.
Please do have a listen.
Franz Kafka died 100 years ago in literary obscurity.
He had instructed his friend Max Brod to burn his unpublished works.
Fortunately for generations of readers Brod did not.
He believed Kafka to be among the greatest writers of his time and instead edited and published his late friend's writing.
In other words Brod decided that Kafka's stories belonged not to the late author but to the literate public.
Brod's conundrum echoes today.
People live online and generate far more data than they did just a decade ago.
Everyone leaves digital traces behind when they die,
either deliberately in the form of social media profiles and posts,
or incidentally with web searches, phone location data, banking records and so on.
Unlike bodies, data do not decay.
According to Carl Amund, a Swedish political scientist,
this condition makes the modern world post-mortal.
The dead remain there for us in a way that has not been possible in pre-digital society,
he observes.