Keep Your Books

WHO'S HOLDING THE PEN — Part 7 of 7. From the desk of Kiler Davenport.

Here's the part where I'm supposed to tell you to panic. I'm not going to.

You've felt the vertigo of the monocle. You've seen that memory fails, that records can move, that one company once reached into people's homes and took a book. You've seen that the truth about intent is murky and the truth about capability isn't.

So what do you do with that?

Something almost embarrassingly simple. Keep paper.

A printed book on your shelf is memory with a body. It can't be updated over the air at 3 a.m. It can't be recalled, refunded, or quietly corrected. To change the past, someone would have to find your copy, and everyone else's, and mine. That's what a thousand identical witnesses looks like.

Buy the books that matter to you in print. Back up what you value offline. Screenshot what you'd hate to lose, and date it. Talk to the people who remember it the way you do.

The hard truth: nobody is going to protect your record for you. The past you can touch is the only one that can't be silently rewritten, so make sure you've got some of it in your hands.

Almost anything is possible. Including the edit you didn't notice.

 Keep your books. Keep your witnesses. This has been Who's Holding the Pen, from the desk of Kiler Davenport.

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