The Way Of IT — CALL TO ACTION: 1011

“History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.” — David C. McCullough

Circe’s Odyssey (Frederick Stuart Church, 1910)

As you welcome a new child into your family, thoughts of legacy and history press close. Memory is to history as storage is to space: moments remembered become part of a shared tapestry, a living — but fragile — archive. Stories travel like data across an OSI model: spoken, written, heard, seen. Ancestors memorized epic poems — Gilgamesh, the Odyssey — to recite beside campfires and in marble halls; you can almost smell the frankincense and myrrh. Conquerors erase civilizations by destroying their stories. The conquered lose identity and must assimilate or vanish. The same fate stalks digital data, which depends on physical states — magnetism, electric charge — and is prey to degradation: data rot, bit rot. Entropy, like death, is history’s greatest conqueror.

The follower of the Way of IT is a scribe and documentarian who treats every ticket as a story. Within those stories — from access requests to recurring incidents — they observe how entropy touches coworkers, citizens, devices, tools, and architecture. The persistent question remains: how do we protect our data and maintain its integrity? That echoes an older refrain: how do we protect our stories and preserve our identity?

Magic Lantern, Optical Toy (1780)

History is not the past but a map of the past, drawn from a particular point of view, to be useful to the modern traveler.” — Henry Glassie

You are among the last filmmakers to have lived through the shift from celluloid to video, from flatbed editing to nonlinear timelines, from chemical processes to digital workflows. You take a certain comfort in disruption; history is threaded with Black Swans, events characterized by being rare, unexpected, and having a massive impact that onlookers feign as predictable after it happens.

On lonely days, you look up at the sun and remember that it shines on everyone. It is a vast source of energy — light, heat — and you need that warmth now. You feel defeated: your feature-length film hasn’t generated enough interest, and stability is elusive. You take odd jobs and receive minimal government support — never enough. Strain appears in relationships. You consider pawning a few of your grandfather’s gold coins.

Where does one find inspiration in this vacuum?

You hold a gold coin to the sun; its shadow crosses your face, and you are carried back through its history. This dense, malleable metal, with a distinctive yellow color and high electrical and thermal conductivity, resembling the sun, has been here since the beginning of time. For millennia, gold has signified power and sanctity, inspired devotion and atrocity. To you, it represents time — more days to build, to create stability. But selling it means sacrificing a link to history. Then a new opportunity arises: a chance to produce for television.

1 Rhine Gold Ducat, Bavaria, Germany, 1830

History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Today, you put history back in your pocket and realize these three golden truths: You are not alone; You are part of everything; Nothing lasts forever. Like the sun, you find warmth in this wisdom, and the path is illuminated, like the trail of a shooting star, within the darkness of your universe.

Today in history: In 1818, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus was published anonymously in London with 500 copies printed. She was 21. Shelley had started writing it at age 18, on 16 Jun 1816. The same year, she married the poet Percy Shelley on 31 Dec.

Regular Tetrahedron (Polyhedron Model by Martin Berman)

If history is the archive we carry forward, what single story will you choose to preserve — and which will you surrender to entropy?