Outsourcing My Self Perspective to a Deadbot?

The Afterlife is digitized, and the revolution WILL be broadcast.

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/26/nx-s1-5508355/ai-dead-people-chatbots-videos-parkland-court

I'm very grateful for Photos.google.com.  There are now decades of photos I can find very quickly. And it includes a lot of digital photos I took of hard copy photos.

And I'm very grateful that wonderful things from artists like Gahan Wilson and Gary Larson and George Carlin (whose comments on the history of the FCC were very topical again, this week. Freedom of Speech should be safe as long as we have volume, channel changing, and other knobs availalbe).

Less grateful that Blogger delists older posts which included hot links that are now dead links.  In 2008, if this blog linked to a current story of 2008, and that link (often to a youtube video, which is another google archive topic) is now 404, the blogspot post linking to that 404 effectively becomes 404.

Understandably, this may be a necessary way to prevent AI from generating millions of blogspot posts and billions of youtube videos. But AI will probably have more time to figure its way past the gatekeepers than I will have time for to go back and edit 17 year old blog posts.

This is the reason I'm now entertaining the idea of outsourcing my blog to my own "Deadbot".

So far, the digitization of thoughts and opinions and images and voice has been marketed as a way to preserve a dearly departed "dead" one - hence the term "dead-bot". And that raises questions - would my parents have wanted me to do that? My father Bill Ingenthron worshiped his grandparents - but they instructed him to burn their love letters (he didn't). So it's an "ethics of recycling" topic.

But I'm in a position to recycle myself. I could outsource my engagement with society - which has always been above and beyond the societal mean. There is a big digital record of my thoughts and opinions, starting with articles and editorials I wrote in the trade press (see academia.edu profile), continuing with the blog, and I'm always piping up on Linkedin and Facebook (to the alarm and consternation of my most significant other person in my life).

Glad to be on a Lucky Planet

Across the universe, the atoms and molecules are abundant. Our planet Earth is less than 1% of all of the matter that we see. A lot less than 1%.

So my body is made up of the same atoms and molecules that exist on billions of other stars and planets, but we have no evidence as of yet that there are other bloggers on other planets at this perceptible time. 

Time is a feature, not a bug. 

Time and space are understandable, thanks to Dr. Einstein, through the theory of relativity. I'm very fortunate that my late mother, Janeth K. (Fisher) Ingenthron, tried to explain Einstein's theory to me in like the sixth grade. And explained the concept of "infinity" to me even earlier, at 4 years old perhaps. 

Thinking about Infinity and the theory of time - that it is relative to the intelligence ability to receive it, like our human ability to read a book which exists in total on the shelf, a page or word or sentence at a time. We have little mouths to eat the Elephant of Time.

Back to Mom... she pushed me to learn other languages (her Major Degree was in German) and to visit other places. Murren Switzerland was my first work-vacation, with IBG which organized projects with 25ish volunteers from 12ish countries to do manual labor - YCC like - to carve hiking trails etc.

 So in Part 1 I told about my background, and how I was raised to avoid debt "at any cost". And digressed a bit to the great grandparents and grandparents who helped to raise me, and their skepticism of charity. 

So I was a bit shocked, in 1980, at the tuition and board cost at Carleton (and you can't really live off campus, so "and board" is priced into tuition). So I signed up for work to offset cost and was assigned, like most Carleton College freshman, to food service. I signed up for the food kiosk in Sayles-Hill.

When I showed up on time the first week of school, there was a sign that said the food service was on strike - Saga Food Service was the campus contractor, and their employees were on strike. The College had closed 3/4 food joints and everyone had to dine at Burton Hall.  So I went to Burton to start work.

It was a bit of chaos that day as all of the 2000+ students were dining in 1/4 cafeterias, but I elbowed my way in to ask about work.

Brian - I don't remember his last name - was the Saga Manager (the company the strike was upon).  As I recall he was six foot three and very fat - maybe 350 lbs.  Big guy. Intimidating. I asked him, in the chaos of fourfold feeding in a onefold cafeteria, where I'd be working.

Brian said sorry kid, all the positions are full. Come back next week.

This. Was. Not. An. Option. For. Me.

I was overwhelmed already by the tuition cost at Carleton, and my grandparents stories about jobs and wages and desperate tiimes in the Depression and "Dust Bowl" all lighted up within me.

Brian had turned around. I circled and pushed my chest right up to him and said I NEEDED THIS JOB.

Brian said listen kid, there are a lot of rich kids here who quit the first few weeks and I should just relax and come back in a week or two, there would be openings.

He turned away again. I got up into his chest again. I said with all my heart, PLEASE, I need to work, I can't afford this place. PLEASE.  LET ME WORK.

Brian looked down and made eye contact. He said that while he had no positons open ,that my insistance was something new. Something he didn't see often. And he said "hypotentically" that he needed another student manager. But that he had NEVER hired a student manager from a first week freshman.

I SHOUTED I WOULD BE HIS BEST STUDENT MANAGER.

I was hired with no experience as a student manager, working directly for Saga Food Service, which was a dollar more per hour but more importantly, not restricted by the student work office to 7 hours per week.  I frequently worked 20 hours, and stayed in that job 4 years.

My Freshman Job Interview at SAGA Food Service - my first week at Carleton College 1980: Part One

My father and my mother were the first people in their high schools (graduated 7 years apart, my dad was older) in Taney County, Missouri. 

My father was raised in a very self-educated household. William E. Freeland, his grandfather, and wife Minnie Freeland (Pawpaw and Mawmaw) whom I lived with for a few months every year, as a child, had hundreds of books he purchased on a government salary stationed in Four Corners - Shiprock, NM, today - before it was the USA state, with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Where there wasn't anyplace to spend your federal paycheck, and nothing to do, so he and Minnie his wife (another family icon) spent their time reading and learning. 

* Pawpaw and Mawmaw Freeland were lifelong letter writers and retired with their friend John G. Neihardt in Branson, Missouri.  Black Elk Speaks was a seminal book I read and re-read in high school and afterwards, only later learning I'd sat on Neihardt's lap as a child... my Dad asked me what I was reading and I assumed he didn't know anything about Black Elk and was surprised when he pointed to the sofa where he and Pawpaw used to talk.

Pawpaw thought welfare and charity were corrupt and corrupting, and in the end thought BIA did more harm than good, "turning a culture morally opposed to hand-outs and charity upon its head".

My mom was raised on a subsistence farm in Taney County - Ridgedale, half a mile from the Arkansas border (she was born in Harrison). Outhouses using Sears Roebuck catalog pages for toilet paper. 

Premise: I was raised by people who didn't beg, borrow, or take family debt. And when I was admitted to Carleton College, the 1980s were when the colleges were absolutely soaking up debt like today's federal deficit. 

The financial aid officer at Carleton told me (and thousands of others) that there is "good debt" and "bad debt" and that a college education was the former.

Not convincing, as I was raised. I asked where the most work was on campus, and was told food service - SAGA. It didn't stand for anything - it was Saga Food Services, a chain providing college and institutional "turn key" cafeteria management.

In Part Two, I'll connect these dots.

3 Minute Middlebury College Blog

Yesterday we presented - in Espanol (I'm enrolled in a 7 week Escuela de Espanol) at Middlebury College.

There were four of us. Me, Kennii from Nigeria (and Stanford University), Bob from Brazil, and Jo - all Spanish 1.5 students presenting on environmental subjects to the students of Middlbury's prestigious summer language college (my wife is Director of the School of French).

Here is a link to my 5 minute presentation on "fotos falsas" and collateral damage.  I was joined by Technico Rudy of Queztatenaga Guatemala.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1drREMgKyYxSNks2prc0SutacLbUAAF5l/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=108266863784829595501&rtpof=true&sd=true

It went over very well. 

People can tell the difference between photos taken in professional refurbishing and recycling factories, and poverty porn pictures of random children placed atop of home-generated junk.

Kehinde “Kennii” Ekundayo has become a friend in the class.  Her presentation was about use of art to draw attention to global warming etc.  Bob and Jo also spoke about warming.  

I spoke about NGOs creating an atmosphere to arrest smart technicians in poor countries doing what my grandfather taught me about - fixing a rich person's broken thing.

80% Ewaste Hoax is dead.

https://www.sdsu.edu/news/2024/05/sdsu-international-student-secures-coveted-spot-in-stanfords-art-history-doctoral-program