michael-dean-k/

Someone dies in my town every day. I know this because I signed up for the newsletter of a nearby funeral home that I often pass by. It's strange to see an institute of death using a Squarespace template with stock photography of the Manhattan skyline and Central Park with animated text saying "Here for You in Your Time of Need," and I did not expect an email input field with the title "Obituary Notifications." Now I get them every morning at 4-8 AM. Half of them are blank—"An obituary is not available at this time for..."—and the other half are templated (including details like day of death, surviving kin, and other biographical details like hometown, college, hobbies, defining attributes). One that stands out, however, is for a forty-year pioneer of the KORG synthesizer.

A long human life get compressed to 350 words of text—shorter than the length of this post—sometimes well-written, sometimes templated, sometimes AI-generated, and sometimes "an obituary is not available at this time." As a writer, it would be snobbish for me to judge the cliches, misuages and inauthenticity of the everyday obituaries. Those are for the families and friends, not objects of literary scrutiny. The actual value of getting these from strangers each morning is to remind myself of my eventual destination. I imagine a scoff, "but you won't be alive to care about your own obituary!" But isn't that a solipsistic view? In all my memories of wakes and funerals, I notice in myself a sudden post-humous interest to make sense of the person in full, outside the illusion of time, perhaps triggered by a 70-year old photo of them youthfully playing guitar, where I realize I've never quite seen them beyond their elderly form. If they had writing to read, I'd read it all.

And so recently I came across the obituary of Ned Stuckey-French, a fellow essay evangelist from a generation before me. He died in 2019. He contributed to both of the recent US/UK volumes on literary theory of the essays (Essayists on the Essay and On Essays). I only knew he died because the On Essays table of contents has a cross next to his name. While I have some major disagreements with the thesis that both books converge on, I got an email from Academia.edu the other day, showing a paper Ned wrote; he was able to synthesize and clarify everything, and suddenly I had the urge to dive into his work. Upon searching him, his obituary is the 2nd result. It was 242 words, but I was thrilled to find a link to his personal website, a portal to understand the man in full.

A prolific writer, Ned concentrated his professional efforts on personal essays and championed the essay as an art form. His efforts were instrumental in saving the University of Missouri Press. Many of Ned's works may be viewed at http://nedstuckeyfrench.com/.

I'm met with a dark blue screen and white banner, saying "This domain is registered at Dynadot.com. Website coming soon." A personal website is a fragile thing. Unlike a platform, where your page stays up as long as the company is solvent, a self-maintained site is virtually bound to disappear if the living author doesn't put together some kind of succession plan. I found his wife's website too, untouched for 12 years, but still up; I imagine myself emailing her and offering help to revive Ned's site, before remembering that I know almost nothing about Ned or their relationship, and it would probably be an intrusion.

This all gets me thinking: how do I set up a website to last a hundred years? Wordpress offers 100-year hosting, and it costs $38,000 ($31/month x 1,200, all upfront). Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder, admitted six months into the project that they've had zero takers. Another alternative is "Posthaven," which promises permanent hosting as long as you pay for one year ($60). Sam Altman uses this. The downside is that you have to use their platform, templates, CMS, and I'm now very much on a "own your data" quest.

A few options:

• Since my website is hosted on Github, I could make that public. Even if the domain gets lost, you can still access the whole vault, and it would be trivial to repoint the entire site on to a different host.
• Quarterly saves to Wayback Machine.
• Compress my whole vault into a single PDF or HTML file, a single thing that is shareable and savable.
• Print my vault into a book/ebook (and register it with the Library of Congress)

For all I know, Ned had his own measures, and I just can't find them. The domain functions as the centralized place, aggregating all the essays and all the links out, but it's the most fragile part of the stack. For now, I can buy up to 10 years in advance on Squarespace. Beyond that, I would need to rope someone into the possibly pathetic-sounding enterprise of a "blog succession plan," because no one really cares about your writing as much as you do, at least while you're alive.

However, reading about christopher.org gives me hope (a story on how friends preserved a dead friend's website). It also clarifies that while 100-YR hosting is $38,000, a 100-YR domain is only $2,000. This points to a paradigm where the bookends of the website stack are solid:

1. The vault of all your files and code (the origin) are Git-hub hosted. As long as there is a singular public repo of everything, it can be shared, downloaded, stored locally, and re-uploaded somewhere else if need be. Considering Github is critical for web infrastructure, it will likely be around for decades, making it a good home for your files;
2. The domain (the destination) can be paid for 100 years in advance, leaving no financial stress on the inheritor;
3. The hosting platform (the middle) can be swappable. The Github vault can be easily connected to one of several free hosting sites. Currently I'm on a paid plan with Netlify, but maybe that's a liability. I need to find one that's free and likely to last, because this is the only fragile link in the system. The guaranteed survival here depends on a document that specifies: (a) the credentials for the 100-YR domain, (b) some loose heuristics on how to go about transitioning to a different hosting platform, and (c) a note of gratitude with some perspective on why it's worth maintaining.

I imagine it's strange to watch someone think through a blog succession plan in far more detail than an audience growth plan. I'm only in my mid-thirties, and it's not like I have any terminal illnesses that I know of, so why am I writing for unborn audiences instead of living ones? Having a kid, I'm sure, has something to do with it. I have a recent essay called "we all inevitably becomes tales," and as I reflect more on deep time, and as I try to visualize my 5-month old daughter as a grandmother, I see more often through a perspective where I no longer exist in the throne of my own consciousness, and instead exist as words being rendered into someone else's. I suppose it brings me a subtle anxiety knowing that, if I were to spontaneously die on my walk today from some teenager barreling into me with their motorcycle as they lose control during a one-handed wheelie down the main boulevard, much of my writing would die with me, and weirdly the real tragedy at the scale beyond my life is that even though the death of my mind, body, and soul is inevitable, the death of my writing is not.