How We Disappear: Thomas Mullaney’s All-Too-Personal History of Information

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. My guest today, Thomas S. Mullaney, is a distinguished historian at Stanford University. He's an expert on Asian Chinese history, Chinese technology. Many of you will be familiar with his work on A Hunt for the Rarest of Chinese Typewriters. It was a book called The Chinese Typewriter, History, which won all sorts of awards. But he has a new book out this week, which in some people's minds might actually be blowing up his own discipline of history. The book is called How We Disappear, A Personal History of Information, and Tom is joining us from Palo Alto, where he lives. Tom, is this a subversive book against your own discipline of history? Are you suggesting that we disappear, that the subtitle of the book is A Personal History of Information, suggests that we're all sand falling through our fingers and nothing can really be remembered?

**Thomas S. Mullaney** (1:43)
Well, it's either the most subversive thing that I could write as an historian or the most vocal defense of what it is that we do. I don't think there's any historian certainly that I have ever met in my profession who doesn't already know that what we claim to do as historians is in some sense an ideal that can ever be reached, the reconstruction of human experience, however you want to frame it.
And then naturally that raises the question, well, kind of why do it? And it's a similar question for life. If death awaits us all, what is the point of in the living? And so this book is my attempt to try to explain to myself and then to readers, what is it and why is it valuable, what we do as historians, but also why is life worth living if, and it's not a claim, we know, the universe dies, the second law of thermodynamics is not to be negotiated with, and so what is the point of it all? So in some sense, it's a defense, a vocal defense as much as it is potentially a bit subversive.

**Andrew Keen** (3:01)
Although you're talking to me, you don't need me to tell you this, from Palo Alto where there are some people, some very rich people, I think who believe they can elude that second law of thermodynamics.

**Thomas S. Mullaney** (3:15)
Yes, I think there are some at least who claim this publicly. I've never met any of them in person, so I don't know their innermost thoughts.

**Andrew Keen** (3:24)
There are other people who, Kara Swisher has a new series out on CNN. She's a critic of these people about wanting to live forever. So I guess in a way this is a book written against those tech utopians.

**Thomas S. Mullaney** (3:42)
I hope they'll read it and maybe arrive at the conclusion that it will face the facts, I guess, has come to terms with it, but then realize that whatever the urgency or ambition that led them to wanting to live forever, that there is an alternative which is kind of rejoining the physical reality, but still finding very, very deep meaning in that. We don't need to last forever to have meant something.

**Andrew Keen** (4:16)
Yeah, and I'm somehow skeptical that guys like Ray Kurzweil will read this kind of book, but that's another story.

**Thomas S. Mullaney** (4:23)
I'm skeptical that anyone will read this book, so I'm aware of that.

**Andrew Keen** (4:26)
Well, I know you're getting a lot of coverage. I mean, a lot of people will read it. It's a very interesting book. So it's a book triggered by very personal loss, the loss of your father and then of your mother.
Tell me a little bit about how the loss of your parents inspired, if that's the right word, this book, How We Disappear.

**Thomas S. Mullaney** (4:49)
Well, it didn't inspire it. In the aftermath of especially my father's death and then into my mother's death, it kind of crystallized it or put it into frame. So this book is about 25 years in the making. My father died in 2017 So obviously, we're not, the timelines are different. But there is something that started in me for whatever reason a very long time ago, where I began to take notice of, repeatedly take notice of, and then you could say obsess with, the way I call it in the book, is intransitive disappearance, forms of disappearance that are not spectacular, like libraries going up in flames or of book burnings or genocide or these cataclysmic singular acts of destruction. But the more drifty sort of loose and everyday and uneventful ways that things disintegrate, fall apart, senesce, obsolesce, and so forth. And I became sort of a pack rat of everything I could get my hands on, from every discipline I could think of, every walk of life.