“The second law of thermodynamics is not to be negotiated with.” — Thomas S. Mullaney
The second law of thermodynamics is non-negotiable. Every schoolchild knows that. Everything decays and every record disintegrates. The universe will end. We all die. So why record history? Why bother remembering? These are the questions that the Stanford historian Thomas S. Mullaney addresses in his intriguing new book, How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information.
How We Disappear is triggered by grief. Mullaney’s father — a man he never quite understood, an exile in an estranged household — died unexpectedly in 2017. Sitting in his father’s office surrounded by the “paperwork of death,” Mullaney’s training as a historian crystallised into an all-too-personal project of disappearance. It’s a book about what Mullaney calls “intransitive disappearance” — not the spectacular, cataclysmic kind of traditional historiography (wars, book burnings and genocide) but the everyday, uneventful ways things fall apart. Like Thomas Mullaney’s dad. Existence as obsolescence, erosion, sinescence and the slow drift of the unremarkable into nothing.
History, in Mullaney’s account, is a Sisyphean fight against this nothingness. We tell stories to survive and maintain the polite appearance of coherence. If you actually tried to reconstruct experience — the thing-in-itself — you would need an infinite library of trillion-page books. Existence, for Mullaney, is a swirl of stimuli and daydream. History tries to domesticate this Borgesian swirl. So does consciousness itself. That’s why, as Mullaney memorably puts it, “historians do the dirty work of necromancers.” Which is to say they negotiate with the second law of thermodynamics.
Five Takeaways
• Intransitive Disappearance. Not the spectacular kind — book burnings, genocide, the Library of Alexandria. The everyday, drifty, uneventful kind: obsolescence, erosion, sinescence. Twenty-five years of obsession. Crystallised by his father’s unexpected death in 2017.
• History as Domesticated Experience. If you tried to actually reconstruct experience, you’d need a trillion-page book. How many hairs were on his head? What did his aftershave smell like? Experience, unfiltered, is an n-dimensional vortex. History domesticates it. So does consciousness itself.
• The Vocal Defence of History. History is the professional counterpart of what every human being does every second: tell stories to maintain continuity and coherence. You are already well into postproduction. The futility of history is the futility of consciousness. Neither is a reason not to try.
• The Second Law Is Not to Be Negotiated With. The universe will end. We don’t need to last forever to have meant something. The meaning is in the making, not the permanence. He’d like the Silicon Valley immortality seekers to read the book and rejoin physical reality.
• AI Bots of Deceased Parents: Stop. We do not have the wetware to maintain critical distance from a deep fake of our deceased mother or father. It short-circuits us. Outside very specific therapeutic settings, he cannot fathom an argument for it. Amusing ourselves to death.
About the Guest
Thomas S. Mullaney is Professor of History at Stanford University, Guggenheim Fellow, and former Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress. He is the author of How We Disappear (W. W. Norton, June 23, 2026) and four previous books on Chinese history.
References
How We Disappear by Thomas S. Mullaney (W. W. Norton, June 23, 2026): wwnorton.com/books/9781324020783
Jorge Luis Borges — infinite libraries, maps that equal the terrain
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.
Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow
Chapters:
00:00:31 Is this a subversive book against history?
00:02:00 Why do history if you can never reach the ideal?
00:03:43 Written against the tech utopians
00:04:50 Intransitive disappearance
00:10:00 The paperwork of death
00:20:00 The trillion-page book
00:29:48 The insanity of reconstruction
00:35:33 Borges: labyrinths and infinite libraries
00:37:23 AI bots of deceased parents: stop
00:41:38 Historians as necromancers