“Never before have so few had so much control over so much information about the past, and with it, the power to shape the present.”

So says Carl Öhman in his new book The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care. As Carl told me on Techtonic this week, Facebook and other Big Tech companies are in full control of the data that will serve as the record of this age:

The same way that they control, or will control, your private access to your individual past, they're also going to control our collective access to society's past. And that is, I think, a very dangerous development that nobody seems to be talking about.

The issue will only grow in the future. As Carl said in the interview:

Imagine the kind of power that they're going to hold in 15, 20 years if things continue on this path.

The Afterlife of Data is a thoughtful book covering our digital legacy and how we, as a species, might try to preserve it outside the profit-obsessed monopolies that currently act as gatekeepers.

To listen to the show, go to the episode page and click the “Pop-up player!” link near the top of the page. (The interview starts at 5:31, if you’d like to jump ahead.)

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