This article is part of a package in collaboration with Forbes on time capsules, preserving information and communicating with the future. Read more from the report.
The world was different in 2005: flip phones were state of the art, Netflix only sent movies by mail, and kale was a garnish, not a main course. I was working for Forbes’s website, Forbes.com. In those days, news websites were treated like awkward teenagers living in a basement apartment, kept at a distance from their respectable parents.
The digital media business was fresh and chaotic, and new journalists like me reveled in the weirdness of the Internet and the opportunities it gave us to experiment. In contrast, magazine sales teams seemed stuck in the Mad Men era, pitching tired concepts over martinis and treating online news like something you threw into a deal for free, like a branded pen.
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Given this context, you can imagine my lack of enthusiasm when our sales department revealed that they had sold a big advertising sponsorship to an IT infrastructure company and asked me, the telecom reporter, if I could put together a special report on the concept of “Communicating.” Fortunately, my editor at the time, Michael Noer, was equally nonplussed at the idea of a dozen stories about routers and network switches.
So we decided to approach the idea of “Communicating” from every single angle other than networking hardware. We commissioned Arthur C. Clarke to write a keynote essay about how technology was actually making it harder for people to communicate with each other. I wrote about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and asked experts how they would craft their own messages to an alien species. And I interviewed two dozen luminaries I’d always wanted to meet about anything I could think of: Noam Chomsky on the spontaneous invention of language; Jane Goodall on how language makes it harder for primates to communicate; Stan Lee on why words are better with pictures.
And because this was 2005, the sales team had promised its client some kind of nebulous “interactive” component of the package, so Michael I and decided to tackle the idea of “communicating across time” by playing with the concept of a time capsule.
This was our thinking: Time capsules are boring. The reason why they are so often created by small-town governments and elementary schools is that they are simple and inoffensive; they offer banal tokens to the future. Your typical time capsule contains items that are either redundant (“Oh, great, a newspaper from 50 years ago, just like I could find in the library or on the Internet”) or meaningless (“I’m sure this toy meant something to the kid who put it in here, but now it’s just trash”).
So we decided to bring the concept into the 21st century: an e-mail time capsule. We built a tool for our website that allowed users to write themselves a message and choose whether they wanted to receive it in one, three, five, 10 or 20 years. Then we threw it open to the public.
It was a hit. Hundreds of thousands of messages queued up—which meant we had to figure out how to actually store and send all those e-mails, and that’s harder than you might think.
Here’s the issue: digital impermanence. Hard drives fail. Formats become obsolete. Remember floppy disks and zip drives? Today they might as well be cuneiform on clay tablets. How could we be sure we had a good way not only to preserve our e-mails but also to make sure they were sent on schedule?
Our solution was, if you ask me, both clever and elegant. We’d build a program that could run on three computers that were owned by three different companies and lived in different places on the Internet. Each would have a copy of the e-mails, and every couple of months, each of them would ping the others and say, “Hey, I’m here.” The recipients would respond, “Yes, I’m here, too.” When the first year was up, instance A would send out all the scheduled e-mails. But if instance B and C didn’t hear from that machine, instance B would send the e-mails, and so on.
With this kind of redundancy built into the sending process, the next issue was figuring out where to place the programs. Forbes was 90 years old, but in 2005 the conventional wisdom was that print media was already dead; it just hadn’t noticed yet. (As the current editor in chief of one of those zombie publications, I would like to note here that Scientific American just celebrated its 180th anniversary, and Forbes turned 108).
So we decided to hedge our bets by storing the data at three very different institutions: first, at Forbes, the longtime lion of capitalism; second, at the Internet giant Yahoo, which had then become a $55-billion company after several years of fast growth; and finally, at Codefix Consulting, a one-man consultancy run by a friend of mine from college, Garrison Hoffman.
We were hedging our bets: Legacy media, blazing-hot dot-com, plucky small business—we figured that between the three of those, we’d have all contingencies covered. These systems might live forever. What could go wrong?
Everything. Yahoo had layoffs within the first few months, and our clever little solution never sent a ping. Forbes was sold to an investment group that included the rock star Bono, and our plucky online newsroom got absorbed by the print team. Garrison sent the first year’s e-mails himself, then the third, then the fifth.
By the time the 10th anniversary rolled around, I hadn’t worked for Forbes for nearly two years. I was a freelance journalist, working on a book, and the e-mail time capsule was the furthest thing from my mind. But the project survived because somebody cared: a few months before the time capsule was supposed to “reopen,” Garrison reached out to me. We put our heads together. Codefix Consulting sent out all the e-mails again.
Our best-laid plans had gone awry, but this new order seemed to work just as well. Garrison and I put reminders in our now totally digital calendars, scheduled to alert us when another decade passed. The project seemed secure.
Just under two years later, Garrison Hoffman died, unexpectedly, at the age of 46.
Another eight years passed. I still miss my friend. But when my calendar notification popped up a few months ago, I remembered why I liked him so much. Searching my e-mail inbox in a mild panic, trying to figure out what to do, I found a message:
“Codefix::Time capsule is a mod_ perl application designed to collect user messages, submitted via HTTP POST to a MySQL database, to be returned to the user via email at select future dates,” it read. “Messages are retrieved from the database and submitted to the local mail transport agent (MTA) by timecapsule.cron. This script should work with any sendmail compatible mail utility, and may also be configured as a backup server.”
Garrison knew and followed the best practices of his trade. He’d documented his work, annotated his code and archived the files on a server where I could find them, just in case.
I called Michael Noer, my old editor at Forbes, who, by now, was also an old friend. We made plans for the anniversary. And as you read this, nearly 18,000 people have received an e-mail from a different kind of old friend—their own past self.
The big takeaway for me is that technology didn’t save this project; human relationships did. We survived the first year and the 20th year because friends stayed in touch. Nothing else went as expected: Yahoo, the billion-dollar giant, vanished from the equation. Forbes, the old media dinosaur, endured.
A one-man shop, and one man’s dedication to his trade, proved the most reliable of all.
Ironically, the original Forbes.com special report on Communicating is now a wreck—images gone, links broken. Digital rot wins there. But the e-mails survived, and opening one is profound. Whether the people who sent them saw their 2005 dreams come true or not, they’ve had a rare chance to compare past hopes to present reality.
My own e-mail to the future is actually kind of prosaic. The subject line: “Hot damn, it worked.”
“Somehow, some way, you got this thing to work properly,” the message continues. “Go track down Michael Noer, who owes you a magnum of expensive champagne for pulling this off.”
That’s why this time machine worked: not because of servers but because of humans, because of people who cared about each other and about something they had worked together to build.
