Seal of Death – The Weird Side of the Internet

Seal of Death – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

I once read something about a three-thousand-year-old cuneiform tablet that was some of the first known writing. It was a customer unhappy with their copper order. Basically a Yelp review. They had no idea that that was what would be found thousands of years later. It would be as if five thousand years from now someone finds a penis I drew on the wall when I was drunk that time. Just imagine that our whole civilization might be judged by the contents of some ice-frozen hard drive.

I think about this because they just found a seal on a 3,300 year-old Hittite tablet in Turkey that says “Break this and you will die.”

So my first thought is okay, curse. Break the seal, and the spirits come and swirl around you like Raiders, your face melts off, whatever. Second thought is that this could have been some kind of contract. Maybe it was a three-thousand-year-old NDA, and they just took it really, really seriously.

I’m a writer, I just don’t mean these dispatches. And I’ve seen time and time again how some piece of writing gets caught up and noticed, and it comes down to dumb luck. It’s disheartening because there’s really no way to “get” your words out there; they might just get pulled out if the stars align. But you have to look at it in a specific way; everything you write has a chance at being one of a handful of things the future knows about us.

It’s a testament to the powers of both time and an individual person. I have an archival disc that has all of my writing, my music, all my art on it. And wherever I go, I look for places that might not be disturbed for a few hundred years. It’s kind of like insurance. I may not get much success now, but in 2526? Who knows.

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