Some time ago, my charitable foundation MagneticOne Org ran a project on preserving humanity's knowledge. The idea was simple. Students and children went to master craftspeople, mostly older people, and filmed them at work. They talked with them. They recorded their memories.
What looked like an ordinary conversation was, in fact, a rescue. Mastery is rarely written down in a textbook. It lives in the hands, in habits, in stories a person tells only to someone who came and asked.
Knowledge disappears quietly
Most knowledge is not lost in catastrophes. It disappears quietly: when a craftsperson stops working, when no one got around to asking the older generation, when old notebooks, letters and photographs are thrown out during yet another move. Nobody notices until it turns out there is no one left to ask.
How it can be done today
Video is only one way. Today knowledge can be captured in many forms:
- copying and scanning documents, notes, drawings, letters and photographs;
- recording audio: a conversation, memories, an explanation of how and why something is done the way it is;
- transcribing recordings into text. AI already helps a lot here: it speeds up transcription and helps organize the material by topic, though the final check is still a human's job;
- building photo galleries of work, tools and processes.
Then this data should be stored electronically, in places set aside specifically for it, so that it does not depend on a single phone or a single laptop. Later it can be published in formats accessible to people: books, galleries and other electronic formats. Printed editions are possible too, but they are more expensive and harder to produce. So the logic for me is: first preserve, then make it accessible, and only then, where it makes sense, print.
Why it matters
Preserving knowledge is care for future generations. Every day we rely on what someone once wrote down, drew, made or explained to an apprentice. Now it is our turn to leave something behind.
I notice that at a certain age, with a certain level of maturity, this understanding comes to everyone, or at least to many of us. First you build, earn, prove yourself. Then you start thinking about what will remain of all this when you are no longer around. And what turns out to be most valuable is not money or titles, but what you know, what you can do, and how you see the world.
If it matters to you too
If preserving your knowledge matters to you, whether it is your experience, your craft, the story of your work or your family, I will be glad to help. Not alone, but together with my brothers-in-arms, like-minded people who also understand that knowledge can be preserved beyond a single human lifetime. Perhaps even beyond the lifetime of a civilization.
Write to me via the contact page.
Open questions
One last thing: a few questions I want to come back to in future posts.
This is not only about the knowledge of individual people. How do we preserve the knowledge of a community: its history, its traditions, the decisions that once helped it endure? How do we preserve the knowledge of a city: its people, buildings, crafts and events that never made it into official chronicles?
How do we preserve the knowledge of a state, so that institutional memory does not vanish as people and circumstances change? And the knowledge of professional groups: doctors, engineers, teachers, soldiers, people whose experience is often passed on only hand to hand?
And the knowledge of organizations, public or commercial. How much experience leaves with a person who resigns, moves away or is killed? How much of it do we manage to write down?
These questions are especially pressing in our turbulent times, when people, archives, buildings and entire communities can be lost in a single day.
And one more, the broadest of all. How do we preserve knowledge so that it outlives not only us, but our civilization? On what media, in what language and in what form should we leave it, so that someone who comes thousands of years after us can read and understand it?