Making everyone an historian
In the future, centuries or maybe just decades from now, will we even need historians? Or will the act of researching and analysing historical events be so accessible and straightforward that no one talks of historians?
Maybe we’ll just ask ChatGPT and its AI will use petabytes of data stored on Arweave to give you a sound bite answer or a full thesis.
Once, only a select few in society were literate. They had access to something scarce: education. And so the rest of society relied on them to carry out essential tasks. In the same way, maybe one day we’ll no longer need historians to help us interpret past events. We’ll all be historians, if we need or want to be, and so no one will talk of this as something noteworthy or differentiating.
The goldmine for today’s historians is the diary – a unique insight into someone’s thinking and experiences. Tomorrow’s historians will have far more of this precious first-person material: perfectly preserved writing, video and audio from people across the globe and from all walks of life.
Stories worth telling forever
Forever Stories are capturing the tales of extraordinary individuals in their podcast. Their first episodes have been focused on travellers who have captured thousands of images and hundreds of hours of video, documenting their adventures.
Their first episode, The Bike Wanderer, chronicles Iohan who explored the Americas via bicycle. His adventures were captured by himself, offering an intimate perspective and inspiring tale of perseverance and exploration. His videos live on, however, some have disappeared after his death. The episode was part of a broader effort to ensure that what remains of Iohan’s content will be preserved on the Permaweb.
In one episode, Christoph Rehage, a writer, photographer, and adventurer who has been shaped by a journey called "The Longest Way." After completing his studies in Beijing, Christoph embarked on an epic adventure walking on foot from China to his hometown in northern Germany. 15 years later and he is still on the "way."
You can listen to the episodes in the Forever Stories' Akord public vault.
Forever Stories are also providing you with the means to record and upload your own story to humanity’s permanent hard drive – Arweave. Recently, a listener submitted their story reflecting on over 30 years in software architecture.
Their service will democratise a new form of preserving and publishing personal stories.
X Akord
Each guest on Forever Stories will have the opportunity to publish content relating to their podcast episode in an Akord vault.
Akord’s media viewer supports audio, files, images and videos, making publishing a creator’s content in a public vault easy to share and view.
We supported Forever Stories in developing their site and brand, and will also help them integrate Akord API. They plan to send user recordings on their website to Arweave through Akord API, using vaults to publish those stories and enable users to share them later.
Creativity and community
Forever Stories is an example of creative publishing on Arweave at its best – high quality creator content that has the potential to showcase Arweave and the benefits of data ownership to an audience far beyond crypto Twitter.
The Arweave ecosystem has been successful at winning developer mindshare and building a very strong ecosystem of builders. But to ‘go mainstream’, we need projects that can tap into culture and win hearts. By focusing on stories and how technology can preserve them, not the technology itself, we can reach more people.
Akord is committed to building a community, not just a company and product. And sponsoring Forever Stories work is part of the beginning of this work.
If you have a creative publishing project on Arweave and you would like to explore partnership possibilities, reach out to me.
