Technological Thanatopsis

News item:

'Lost in Space' Actor Harris Dies
Mon Nov 4, 9:44 PM ET

By ANTHONY BREZNICAN, AP Entertainment Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Jonathan Harris, the flamboyantly fussy actor who portrayed the dastardly, cowardly antagonist Dr. Zachary Smith on the 1960's sci-fi show "Lost in Space," has died. He was 87.

And so another bit of pop culture passes from the scene, assuming a kind of iconic immortality on some cable channel. Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs thought that after death, they would ascend to heaven as a god, and be seen as a star. These days, the more modern view is that you become a star first, and then die in syndication.

In another ten years or so, very many of the shows in syndication will have casts made up almost entirely of dead people. Keeps costs down, I suppose. Why do you think that RCA re-issues a new Toscanini set every 10 years or so? Think about it, though. For the first time in history, we have the world-view of previous generations being passed down directly (in color, even) to generations with very different demographics and cultural outlook. Some big discordancy there. Fred MacMurray may have gone to that big Disneyland in the sky, but his early 60's earnestly square outlook is still being beamed out to millions every day as the picture of normal California family life (if that's not an oxymoron.)

The 21st Century is being continuously inundated with scenes from life in the mid-20th Century, a vicarious form of time travel. People are now able to escape to eras of their choosing, if only for a little while, and if only in the imagination.

But what if the good old days could be brought back to life, in some directly experienced way?

There are already speech synthesis techniques that work by concatenating tiny pieces of utterances from a human speaker to form new utterances. Given enough voice samples, you could have the voices of famous people saying things that the people themselves never said in real life. More than that, you could have the voices of famous people speaking lines in new productions, long after the original people are gone from the scene.

Now the real fun begins. Who owns the rights to the voice, appearance, and mannerisms of people who are no longer alive?

Here is a semi-facetious suggestion. Doctors, lawyers, and other professional people already incorporate themselves. Everybody should do this, using incorporated status to file copyright notices on their voice, appearance, and mannerisms for use by future generations. I can see a new kind of investment vehicle, where instead of leaving your loved ones an insurance policy, based on the statistics of a lottery cushioned by the demographics of growing population, you can leave them - you! Or at least the distinct, IP-protected bits that make you, you, in standards-friendly digital form, ready for licensing and evergreen revenue production.

Note that Microsoft already owns an encyclopedia (Encarta) and a multimedia archive (Corbis)? What happens to shared cultural experience when it is no longer shared, but licensed out?

My guess is that as the real world becomes more entangled with the virtual world, personas will be as important as persons, and that the future of the future lies in customizable re-creations of the past.