It's gathering season. Some critical thinking is in order.

In this excellent sequence in Foundation, Emperor Cleon was dishing out a punishment by erasing all traces of terrorist's history.

Doing so is not a matter of erasing database records. It takes eradicating all 1,500+ people who would remember her after she's gone.

Seasonal gatherings have this utility of compiling a set of human who are made to remember you, most of them not by choice. In doing so, they come to define who you are in the collective history.

Some definitions: collective history is not the same thing as personal history in that the former is how the world sees you; the latter is the stories you tell yourself about you.

It's easy to think the digital footprints we leave behind are enough to reconstruct ourselves digitally. But that's really barely enough to cover personal history. At best the result would be one dimensional in painting the picture of you.

Family (or friends you didn't choose) though provide data points that are free of your tampering. They tell stories about dark sides of you that makes you three dimensional.

If it comes a day when machine-learnt digital resurrection is possible, I wouldn't trust a copy of you that doesn't incorporate beefs against you by your family.