Signals for what’s next – and what matters
Health ⎪ Innovation ⎪ Society
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Hey Reader,
We used to store grain.
Then we stored money.
Now we store data.
Soon we will store identity – and with it significance, meaning and perhaps immortality.
This is the new afterlife: to live on in the feed, the search results, the training data of tomorrow’s intelligence.
Once AI and the internet has absorbed us – what of us will remain?
The great question of society will be how we (re)code our humanity.
Grain
The act of storing grain was revolutionary. It enabled human beings to master time. We stopped foraging and remaining nomads. We create stable societies. It birthed our earliest form of ethics and economy.
With grain, we built armies, cities and temples.
Grain was more than food—it was power, stability, the original form of wealth. It represented life extended through the seasons.
But more importantly, it represented control over uncertainty. Over death, famine, and forgetting.
As much as with papyrus and clocks, grain was our way of keeping pace with Earth and helping us to remember.
Money
Grain abstracted into currency because a symbolic form of value. It became easier to exchange but also hoard. As we can see in recent events, the desire to store wealth has not diminished.
Money has become the dominant unit of stored power. It promises security, access, and legacy.
Capitalism turned money into an engine of progress—but also an illusion of permanence. People no longer stored food—they stored futures.
Self
Grain was stored because it could be eaten.
Money was stored because it could be spent.
But the digital self is stored so it can be seen.
Today, the most sought-after commodity isn’t food or currency—it’s the self, extended through digital means. Attention is the means to enhance the self.
We archive our thoughts, curate our identities, publish content, build audiences. Through social media, newsletters, videos, and AI-enhanced avatars, we are seeking to replicate and scale our consciousness.
We call it branding, influence, or reach. But at its core, it’s an existential technology: a way to resist erasure. To become searchable. To be remembered.
We now live in an attention economy where visibility is value. Where the algorithm decides relevance. Where being forgotten is the ultimate poverty.
We see this in examples from the profound to the petty.
This has profound implications:
• Economic: Platforms monetize our desire to be remembered.
• Social: Status flows from followers and likes rather than titles or deeds.
• Psychological: Our mental health becomes entangled with digital performance.
From cloud storage to AI avatars to blockchain identities, we’re developing tools not just to express ourselves, but to preserve ourselves. The goal is no longer just longevity of the body (though interest in this is rising), but persistence of the persona.
We went from the body, to the bank, and to the burden of holding too much.
But if the Buddhists are right, then this is an alter to our false selves. We’ve just doubled our ego from the one in our heads to the one living in our phones.
It may be why the rise of technology is inter-laced with rising mental health challenges.
Postscript
What we store is of course is what we value.
But it’s also what we fear losing and what we hope to leave behind.
We used to store grain to survive the winter.
We stored money to survive the future.
Now we store ourselves, hoping to survive oblivion.
I’m not sure if our society’s massive bet on digital life – a storage ecosystem – can truly provide the things we really seek – togetherness, meaning and a witness to our hopes and dreams.
If it can, then we really have found a novel path to immortality. Or at least making peace with death.
That can be a start for a new chapter – a needed one – in our evolution as persons and people.
If not, then we will be haunted by traces of the digital ghosts we left behind.
Tomorrow Can’t Wait,
