Peter Griffin: Marking time for the future

Internet provider Yahoo, which may become more important in our lives if a rumoured tie-up with Telecom comes to pass, is trying a unique internet experiment.

It is building an internet time capsule, "a snapshot of who we are in 2006 to share with generations to come", and is inviting contributions of digital material - in text, images, audio, video and drawings.

Yahoo will give the results to the Smithsonian Institution and bury a copy on its Californian campus.

It's a bit of a gimmick, designed more than anything to promote Yahoo. We're all building our own personal time capsules that will be around after we die. But it got me thinking about what material I might submit.

I'd start by archiving the entire contents of the Wikipedia.org online encyclopedia, freezing all updates and entries on October 31, to show future generations our interpretation of world events at that point.

I'd include a PDF version of the May 2006 judgments against Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling in the Enron case to show the extent of corporate greed at this juncture.

To explain to future generations the attitudes that have contributed to our current global predicament, I'd include the column "Muslim Bites Dog" from the website of rightwing rent-a-pundit Ann Coulter.

I'd throw in a Google Earth digital map of New Zealand to show future generations where the coastline was and the best bach locations before the water came up.

To back up that point, I'd include a pirated version of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, downloaded via Bittorrent, the peer-to-peer downloading network in vogue at the moment.

There'd be a few YouTube.com video clips of people dancing in their underwear and frat boys lighting their farts to illustrate how two 20-something geeks pulled-off the biggest dotcom robbery of the millennium by selling YouTube to Google for US$1.6 billion.

And to illustrate how refined our taste for reality TV has become, I'd include the top 10 downloads from ghoulish website Ogrish.com - insurgent sniper attacks in Iraq and horrific traffic accidents.

All of that might suggest to future generations that those living in 2006 were a shallow, greedy bunch, hell bent on destroying each other or on collectively amusing them-selves to death. To prove that there was still some hope, I'd submit the Myspace.com pages of 100,000 randomly chosen teenagers. On second thoughts, that might be more damaging than everything else combined. Yahoo plans to project the best contributions against the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, Mexico, from October 25 and into space for anyone there observing our extraordinary world from a safe distance.

Finally, I'd include footage from my favourite web camera, which shows container ships moving through the Miraflores and Gatun locks, the water rising and falling in endless repetition. They'll likely still be doing that in a hundred years.