How We Disappear: Information in Life and in Death
July 9, 2026 6:00 pm
How We Disappear: Information in Life and in Death comes to Local Economy in Oakland on Thursday, July 9, from 6:00 to 7:30 pm.
This is a thoughtful one. Stanford historian Thomas Mullaney will talk about the ideas behind his new book, shaped by the loss of his parents and the strange trail of records, photos, objects, genes, and memories that remain after a life ends.
He will be joined by Tamara Kneese, author of Death Glitch and a Senior Research Scientist at Partnership on AI. Kneese has spent years looking at death, technology, online memory, and what happens when platforms try to manage grief.
Local Economy feels like a good Oakland setting for this kind of conversation. The room lends itself to close listening, quiet reactions, and the sort of questions people keep thinking about on the walk home.
Go if you like history, technology, family stories, or big human questions handled with care. This one sounds personal, but also very easy to relate to.
When Stanford historian Thomas Mullaney “lost” both his parents, he began thinking of how information—all the stuff that makes us, that we make, and that we leave behind—ultimately disappears. The information that makes up our lives, from mundane official documents, poignant family photos, and sentimental artifacts to the cues embodied in our genes, both defines us, and inevitably decays, no matter the medium. Everything that we put “in formation” eventually collapses into randomness. Never is this more evident than in the wake of a parent’s death. Yet from all these elusive, even evanescent, data points, history is written and a future is made. Mullaney’s new book about these ideas is called How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information.
He’ll be joined in conversation by Tamara Kneese, whose 2023 book Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond provides an ethnographic and historical account of the internet of death.
Kneese is now a Senior Research Scientist at Partnership on AI. Previously, she led Data & Society Research Institute’s Climate, Technology, and Justice program and Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab.