BITEradio: How We Disappear by historian Thomas Mullaney

In the public imagination, we’re living in an era of permanent memory: everything is stored, searchable, and retrievable, especially now, as AI systems ingest vast archives of human speech, images, and text. Yet How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information, by Stanford Professor of History Thomas Mullaney tells a more unsettling truth: information doesn’t naturally endure. It breaks down, scatters, becomes unaffordable to recover, and far more often than we admit, simply vanishes. Thomas S. Mullaney is Professor of History East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University. A Guggenheim Fellow and former Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress, he is the award-winning author of The Chinese Typewriter (winner of the John K. Fairbank Prize) and other books on the global history of technology and information.