History is often presented along political threads, which invariably revolves around a discussion of the various monarchs and wars packaged in endless series of dates. After a while it all becomes a blur and very repetitive.
But it’s not all like that. James Burke wrote along technology threads tracking how one innovation enabled another and so on and then tied these to some event which many would recognize. For example his quote: If the Normans didn’t have stirrups we’d all be speaking Saxon.
Will and Ariel Durant did cover dimensions other than the political as well, such as a sojourn into the Egyptian mummification process. Pepys’ Diary provides an insight into the daily life of one man in the 1660’s.
Al Jazeera America recently published a timeline of the Snowden Leaks. Through these leaks it becomes clear that the NSA is capable of and does capture all communications and interactions: all telephone calls; all web activity. The slide below provides a summary of the soruces and types of data collected across the web. Furthermore the data is archived for future use. It seems it does not matter if it is encrypted or not.
But it’s not just the Americans: the French have been doing ti for years as well. The NSA has financially supported British Intelligence gather information they are not able to. The Germans have provided information to NSA programs. This is a world-wide collection.
But think about it as Pepy’s Diary, except it’s not just one man’s observations, it is the actual record of what billions of people are doing every day, every hour, every minute and the interactions among them. An electronic tapestry with millions of communications threads recording actions and responses that can be followed across tens or hundreds or thousands of people. The totality of all the mundane: all those pictures of restaurant food; the tweets announcing “I’ve just woke up”; all the “likes”; all those pictures of all those cats.
A detailed analysis of this store could reveal the meaning of life.
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