The inevitability of decay
An interview with historian Tom Mullaney on his book "How We Disappear"
I discovered Tom Mullaney’s work a few years ago, when a friend told me I should pick up The Chinese Typewriter, his history of how Chinese characters were nearly banished from modern computing and how they survived. It took me a while—I can’t remember how much time passed until I acted on her suggestion, but for some reason or another, I did.
Its introduction was enough for me to decide to reach out to Tom:
To historicize and deconstruct something is merely to destabilize it momentarily… In this act we perpetually exert ourselves to drag concepts back mere inches from the precipice toward which everything slides inexorably: the precipice that separates the realm of critical thought from the vast wasteland of the given (The Chinese Typewriter, 31).
I had read Ezra F. Vogel’s biography of Deng Xiaoping a few months prior. Late in the book, in his discussion of Tiananmen Square, Vogel makes a rare appearance as a historian among historians: we cannot know, he writes, whether China’s path to greater freedom will prove less torturous than the Soviet Union’s, or what part the spring of 1989 will have played.
Tom, on the other hand, was telling me his work was necessary and doomed, and I wanted to know more about this person who believed his work was bound to fade, but pressed on nonetheless. When we spoke, Tom explained to me that he wanted to invite the reader into the instability that characterizes his work. Even as an expert, he does not want to see himself as transcending his reader.
In How We Disappear, Tom brings the historian’s sensibility to his own life. He at once reflects on the self-destruction of ink, the birthplace of demography and the surveillance-laden origins of modern identity, the violence in a historian’s choice to record some things and not others, and the deaths of his parents. It is poetic, authoritative, and fully Tom. I can hear his voice as I read it.
Tom described this book to me, once, as “a thought more advanced than he was ready for.” This phrasing stuck with me because his earlier books hardly seem underdeveloped. But what it took to write this book—an unsparing eye turned towards his own family history—is something his earlier work did not ask of him.
I do not know why I seek to understand the people behind the work I love, any more than Tom knew why he set out to study China. But I’m glad, in this case, that I did.
Afra Wang and I interviewed Tom a few months ago, virtually. I have edited this interview lightly for concision and clarity, and italicized where it felt appropriate.
Afra: The book is clearly the product of multiple decades of preparation. At some point, your personal stories and your scholarly work seem to have become part of the same project. When did you realize they belonged together?
Tom: When I describe the book and mention that I’ve been working on it for 24 years, people usually get confused. The book begins with my father’s death and ends with my mother’s—so people assume one of them died 24 years ago. That’s not it.
The origins trace back to a moment in grad school that I describe in the book: a troubling realization about my note cards. I discovered I was doing the very thing I would later diagnose as a general cultural obsession—seeking collapse in dramatic, catastrophic form, rather than recognizing the more fluid, ongoing background radiation of what I call intransitive disappearance.
That moment was probably the first crystallization. I began inventorying—which is just how I think. When something concerns me, I start assembling examples. I once assembled patents for Chinese typewriters; this time I was tabulating every instance of entropy, disappearance, degradation. But unlike Chinese typewriters, which exist in finite number, the exemplars of degradation are infinite. The project mushroomed immediately. With every passing moment I became more certain this was not a neat optional idea—it was a central preoccupation. The trouble was I had no logical frame for it.
I proposed a second book on disappearance in my Stanford job-search cover letter, framed within China studies: something like Dance, Dialect, and Disappearance. I put together a speaker series at Stanford called Project Absentia. But I could never close the frame. It felt like a book smarter than me. My mind was composing music I couldn’t yet play. I had to delay, because to do it prematurely would have been worse than not doing it at all.
Then came my father’s death. Not at his bedside, not in the hospital that day, but somewhere in the strange emotional rubble—and strange clarity—that followed. The lifelong obsession with trying to understand what my family was and is suddenly converged with the entropy framework. I don’t remember the exact day, but I think I wrote something like: family anecdote, entropy framework, anecdote, framework, framework. Enough Lego pieces clicked that the hundred which didn’t fit no longer felt like failure.
That’s when I knew the architecture was possible—and architecture, for an author, is primarily the permission to exclude. To legitimately say: I’m not doing that. What resulted was the longest book I’ve ever worked on and the shortest I’ve ever written—deliberately so, to keep myself from attempting the encyclopedia.
Daniel: The book moves from a state of anxiety about entropy and disorder to something almost like its reverse: the idea that we are something happening to entropy. The register of your writing produces resonance, but also something more layered—anxiety, fear, and a strange okayness. Do you feel a gap between what you were able to say in the book and what you wanted to communicate?
Tom: Yes. Every book changes you—but this one taught me there is a deeper level to what that can mean. Over the course of writing it, I changed my mind about both my parents, and especially my mother.
What I arrived at—and what I think this book is the closest I can come to—is forgiveness. I’ve never really understood what forgiveness is. I used to think of it as a declaration of peace at the end of a long war: the final scene of Return of the Jedi, Ewoks dancing, the Empire defeated. Clean and final.
What I discovered is that forgiveness is actually an extension of the war—it requires ongoing labor and maintenance. It’s not a final relaxation of the muscles. I had to build my own structure of forgiveness before I could apply it.
And for me, that structure had to be empirically valid. Forgiveness that departs from what’s empirically true has always seemed to me like an act of faith I can’t perform—the same reason I find religious belief, as such, nearly impossible. But the forgiveness I arrived at in this book feels empirically robust: a forgiveness of impermanence, of death, of the end of it all, and therefore of the limited, frightened people my parents were. I didn’t understand until very late in life how scared my father actually was. How fearful a person he truly was. They were doing what we’re all doing—putting the mask on themselves before they could put it on anyone else. And I can now place that act of forgiveness within a larger structure of reality as I understand it.
This didn’t happen across the full 24 years of the book’s gestation. The clock began with my father’s death and continued even through drafts one and two. My editor at Norton, Alane Mason, pushed me—not about argument clarity, but about what I actually thought and felt. I had to sit back and think harder. Somewhere between draft seven and twelve, something had shifted. I write in the book that a prior version of me would have come down on the side of history. I can’t do that anymore.
Afra: Did being a historian of China inform your understanding of disappearance and catastrophe? And do you think art—Proust and Cao Xueqin are the examples that come to my mind—offers a genuine form of resistance to entropy?
Tom: On the first: I’m not sure whether history became the framework that housed my particular disposition toward melancholy, or whether choosing history as a profession drove that disposition forward, or whether there’s a dialogue between the two. An early interest in Buddhism and Zhuangzi gave me a vocabulary for impermanence—one I didn’t fully understand then, and arguably still don’t.
What I needed, for my own spiritual education, was an intermediate zone I couldn’t find in popular Buddhist discourse. The starting point—you seek pleasure in a new car, you invest hope in your family, but we age and die, and the empirics are incontrovertible—is something I could accept entirely. But I couldn’t follow the maneuvers to the Eightfold Path, or to moving beyond mental forms. The path didn’t make sense to me yet.
What I needed to write for myself, in language I could understand, was this: entropy doesn’t happen to us—we are happening to it.
The metaphor I keep returning to—one that doesn’t appear in the book—is an elevator with a snapped cable, plummeting. Initially terrifying. But now imagine the building is nearly infinitely tall, and the elevator is the size of a planet. Everyone is born into this falling elevator, lives in it, builds religions in it, dies in it—and eventually we forget entirely that we are plummeting. Everything we construct quietly accommodates the freefall, to the point where we no longer register it. What do you call a structure built with collapse at its foundation? That’s not the same as a structure built for permanence that then experiences degradation.
When I arrived at this, two things happened simultaneously. I understood why things are impermanent. And I developed an outsized admiration for them—because they are feats of wonder, built in a plummeting elevator. Before, following a more classical Buddhist path might have meant moving past these attachments. Now, I can honor them precisely as the works of art and survival that we needed, and still need, every second of every passing day. The antagonism I once felt toward these forms has dissolved. They’re not stable things that entropy will eventually reach—they are constructions within the plummet. The elevator has so long to fall, and is so spacious, that the fall no longer registers to us.
As for whether my path through Chinese history provided vocabularies: undoubtedly. I think the melancholy was already there, and would have expressed itself regardless—whether I became a historian of China or an anthropologist of France. But the route I took gave me a language I would not otherwise have found. And on art as resistance to entropy: I believe art is a survival mechanism. Whether it resists entropy or collaborates with it, I’m genuinely not certain. But it is how we turn one kind of pain into another.
Daniel: The plummeting elevator reminds me of a point in The Chinese Typewriter about contingency—about the historian’s Sisyphean task of reminding us that the world didn’t have to be this way, and that forgetting contingency is a kind of intellectual suicide. In both cases we forget the condition we’re living in. How do you think about the relationship between the two projects?
Tom: The Chinese Typewriter and The Chinese Computer were, in a real sense, base stations on the route to How We Disappear—and both came from this book. The question that led me to the patent document for the first Chinese typewriter emerged from Project Absentia, from a talk I gave called “How Does Everything Disappear?” At that point, an entropy project was professionally untenable. The typewriter work became, pragmatically, a kind of holding pattern while the deeper book hopefully took shape.
It came, specifically, from my capstone essay for that speaker series, which examined Chinese characters that had simply drifted out of usage—not taboo characters, just ones no one reads anymore, whose meaning and pronunciation are now entirely unknown. The question was: how does something jostle loose of existence? What’s the difference between existing and being extant? Those are not the same concept.
Over the course of writing the typewriter and computer books, I spent most of my time in what I call the sewers of meaning—in the machinery of semiotics, in the material infrastructure of how meaning is made. Things like the recipe of the metal alloy in a dot-matrix printer pin. Chan Yeh, working on Chinese information technology, discovered that the alloy was literally tuned to the Latin alphabet—pack the pins more densely, and they bend and break. Latin alphabetic dominance was baked into the metal itself. I spent years in the drop ceilings and back walls of meaning, because that’s where everyone working on Chinese, Japanese, and non-Latin scripts had to work—hacking, fixing, rebuilding, reimagining.
That turned out to be a training ground for this book. Because when I came to write about the disappearance of human beings, the raw material—ink destroying itself, the inherent vice of ballpoint pen ink, vinegar syndrome, protein degradation—was already familiar territory. I’d spent years in material semiotics without knowing I was preparing for this. The sewers of meaning were where the main characters of How We Disappear had been living all along.
Afra: Your honeybee colony chapter hit me especially hard. I think many people who have come from chaotic families, who’ve had to mature early and become what your chapter calls the “premature bee,” will find something similar in it. What would you say to people who carry that kind of inherited trauma, and may or may not have found a way to process it? And how do you move from the chaos into something the world might recognize as meaningful or beautiful?
Tom: I’m very sympathetic to that framing, because I do believe art is a survival mechanism—a process of turning pain subset one into pain subset two, where subset two is something like a song. Subset one is not something you’d wish on anyone.
The most sincere piece of advice I can offer is this: there are some things where the timescale is simply not on your side. On my YouTube channel I talk about navigating academia and about mental health—and for certain kinds of confusion, it’s possible to give advice with a pragmatic yield you can foresee. With generational and intergenerational trauma, the timescale exceeds anything a human life can zoom out far enough to see. There is no vantage point within a single lifetime that lets you survey generational patterns. They exceed the frame.
What we can do is a kind of cartography of trauma—tracing the shape of something that, technically speaking, no one has ever fully seen. A cartographer can move through space, keeping track, and end up with a faithful map—but the cartographer never actually saw the territory all at once. In the absence of fully seeing it, there’s always the doubt, or simply the unawareness, because the clock of each of our lives just starts, and everything is already the way it is at that moment. The question of where did this come from doesn’t always even emerge. When it does, often later in life, that cartographer’s perspective finally becomes available.
The most honest thing I can offer is not it will get better—but rather: it is real, and it is absolutely comprehensible and sane to feel as awful as you feel. That’s the part I wish someone had told me earlier.
There’s a story about my father that didn’t make it into the book—too subtle for prose, but let me tell you. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with environmental pollution. I started a neighborhood magazine called Pollution Solution, photocopied it at the local equivalent of Kinko’s, sold it for a quarter. I did research at the public library—all pre-internet—and got on the roster to speak at the Maryland Senate about establishing a tire disposal site.
I was nervous. I was there with my best friend, in the wooden pews of the Senate chamber. A man who seemed ancient—he was probably forty—gently bumped into me as he passed. I looked up and said thank you, completely flustered. Then I got to the podium and I killed it. I was eloquent. They were charmed; they found me funny; they asked if I knew who my senator was. It was perfect.
My mom picked me up afterward. That was the story as I understood it, for my entire youth and well into adulthood.
Then somehow, years later, it came up again. I said, you picked me up, Mom. She said: I wasn’t there. Your dad brought you. I said: Dad wasn’t there. She said: He stayed in the car. In the parking lot.
He stayed in the car because he was so afraid of not knowing what to do as a father if his son choked up, cried, or collapsed in front of those senators. Rather than risk not knowing how to hold me through that moment, he sat in the parking lot and let me handle it alone—and then regretted having missed it, because of his own fear.
Now that I’m a father myself, I don’t even know how to name that. It’s not weakness in the alpha-male sense. It’s something vaster: I would rather my son fail alone, with strangers nearby, than have to be the person to catch him. That’s when a whole other person came into view—someone I’d never been able to see. And that cartographer’s glimpse doesn’t actually give me access to him. It just makes everything, in a strange way, more mysterious.
So the advice, compressed: it’s real, and there’s a reason it’s hard above and beyond what’s immediately happening. There is a mismatch of scale that is simply not in your favor when you’re trying to make sense of it. And—most importantly—try not to be hard on yourself for not being able to surmount it. It’s hard enough without being hard on yourself about it.
Afra: That resonates. I imagine many people first experience inherited trauma as blame or resentment. Is that healthy?
Tom: It is healthy. Or more precisely: it is what our organisms do. Does it map perfectly onto general good advice—the kind you’d give about sleep or nutrition? Probably not. But it’s not in that category. It’s closer to breathing. To resent yourself for having those reactions—I felt this, I did that, I felt this again—is akin to resenting the body for having to metabolize, to breathe, to eat. It is that fundamental to simply keeping it together. It’s hard enough without adding that weight.
That’s the materialist in me responding: it’s not falling into old habits, as though you could simply choose otherwise. It’s what we mean when we say I, me, you. In STS—science, technology, and society—I used to tell students: you cannot draw a dotted line around the technology and call that the thing. You have to stretch the frame, and there you find labor, material, concept, ecology. We are metonyms for ourselves. What we call I is a shorthand for all of that.
Those dormant neural pathways—that regime of smells and sounds and associations—is what I call the diaspora in the book. We only become aware of a diaspora when the center of it ceases to be. Then we realize we only ever had the silhouette. While the center is alive, we simply are the clearest part of our own diaspora, and it doesn’t feel like something we could surmount through willpower—because it isn’t. It’s real, and it’s there. But it doesn’t feel like it’s there. It feels like we should be able to override it. Every single time I went home, I was plugged back into that particular matrix. There was nothing to do but say: okay. Here we go.
Daniel: This book will exist in the minds of its readers for some period of time, and then, eventually, it too will disappear. For most books, it will one day be as though they had never existed. When you think about this in the context of your own work—why write at all? Why do anything?
Tom: Two things come to mind, and they connect to a piece of an earlier question I didn’t fully address. Let me flag them: dignified disappearance, and the question of contingency versus determinism.
On contingency first. A passage that didn’t survive into the final book was one where I reflected on how fashionable it’s become for historians to invoke contingency. I’ve never been fully satisfied with that discourse. I’m not a determinist in human affairs, but most discussions of contingency strike me as sloppy—contingency deployed as a placeholder for mere complexity. Something of sufficient n-dimensionality isn’t truly contingent; if we could map all those dimensions, it would look like dominoes. We can’t, so we call it contingent.
My own sense is that there are three distinct things: false contingency, which is just a label for high-dimensional complexity; real contingency, which I think is genuinely rare and should be treated with a certain preciousness; and absolute determinism, which is the outer envelope within which all of it operates. The book makes a kind of joke along these lines: whatever contingency may or may not exist in human experience, all of it operates within the absolute determinism of entropy. This is going to happen.
So what does history look like if we put that predetermined frame at the very center, rather than at the margins? What we’re left with is something that, from the moment of its first breath, is already more an act of decay than of existence—even intonation is in some sense already dissolution.
In the everyday—not in art or philosophy, just in living—what I now feel is something approaching wonder. I kept it together today. My shit didn’t stay together, because it never was together—but I made it through. I’m more impressed with reality than I’ve ever been.
On why we bother with anything that smacks of endurance: I think, first, we simply have to. We lie to ourselves—necessarily, beautifully. We go to yoga retreats seeking equilibrium, even though equilibrium is death. We write books meant to outlast us, even though they won’t, not really. This human self-delusion is not a shame; it is part of what is most beautiful about being human. It’s part of the beauty of being human that we have to do this.
And then there is the idea of dignified disappearance. In the last forty or fifty years, there’s been a wonderful—and increasingly everyday—movement around dying on one’s own terms: do-not-resuscitate orders, dying at home, writing living wills. My mother, who was in almost every respect unreceptive to psychological or intellectual openness, still put together a detailed plan toward the end: I want this, I don’t want this. That has become apolitical—no longer a hippie leftist position, just a fact of life.
I think there’s an opportunity to ask analogous questions about everything else we leave behind. Not just how we die, but how we disappear. Would you like to disappear the way a statue disappears—still standing in the plaza, encrusted with bird droppings, while people eat their bagels and don’t even glance at the inscription? When you see that, do you feel terror, or a strange peace? Or would you prefer to disappear the way a pop song does—excerpted, decontextualized, Lust for Life repurposed as a cruise-line advertisement? Does that horrify you, or is it actually fine? Scavenge me for parts. Sing me into total disappearance.
For myself, I honestly don’t know yet which mode I’d prefer. When I walk into a library and see the rows of books—all those people who went through the same process I went through, with the same delusions about what could endure—and realize my book may be the equivalent of a 1920s telephone directory: I genuinely don’t know how I feel. But I also have thousands of songs sitting on hard drives. Maybe my grandchildren’s grandchildren, if they exist, will be twenty-second-century post-hip-hop artists who sample my old recordings and have no idea who I was. And I think I’m okay with that.
I’ve been calling it, for myself, light Buddhism. Not the full practice of conceptually dismantling the body and sitting with the fact of impermanence—not everyone is ready for that. But the everyday version: would I rather die at home or in a hospital, surrounded by machines? Would I rather my kids have to sort through decades of accumulated possessions? These are questions we can sit with without achieving nirvana, without leaving the matrix. We have plenty of examples around us. The question of which disappearance vector do I feel okay with is actually a fairly graspable one, and I think it’s worth asking.
Daniel: You’ve described several forms of disappearance. Are there forms of survival you would not want—private manuscripts published against your wishes, for instance?
Tom: Do I want to be the park bench where someone has a terrible fight in Central Park—that odd place where life happened in all its mess? Weirdly, I might be okay with that. Or think of the writer who leaves instructions to burn the manuscripts, and says: “I know I don’t want to disappear in a way that lets people rummage through what I was not prepared to share.” These are real preferences. I wonder whether they could ever achieve the same everyday status as a living will—just part of how we prepare to go.
Afra: One more image the book called to mind: Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” Even the king of kings—rendered into a stretch of empty sand. I didn’t grow up reading English poetry in school, but that image lodged itself.
Tom: It’s a powerful one—and it connects to something I’ve been turning over: ruin photography, ruin tourism, what people call ruin porn. I’m almost tempted to write an op-ed arguing we have it entirely wrong.
What we see in a ruin is not primarily the story of breakdown. Viewed differently—more accurately, I think—a ruin is evidence of the timescale of degradation. It shows us that entropy moves at a speed far beyond what we can witness in real time. And it reveals something stranger: that the real action of disappearance is happening somewhere we’re not looking.
Drive through northern Italy and you’ll see this on almost every farm: a functioning house, a working barn, and next to it, a crumbling stone structure from some earlier century, left alone. Why doesn’t anyone tear it down? Because what we’d conventionally call oblivion—the total elimination of that structure—would require enormous capital, labor, and legal effort. It costs more to erase than to abandon. So you leave it. The story of its disappearance is not the visible ruin you’re photographing. The real action is invisible, happening at a timescale that dwarfs the frame.
This connects to what I call intransitive disappearance in the book: not unraveling into nothing, but being unraveled and re-raveled simultaneously. The classic physics question—how do complexity and the second law of thermodynamics coexist?—surfaces here. If entropy were simply a process of pieces becoming sub-pieces becoming goop, they should have had ChatGPT and we should have the caves of Lascaux. And yet here we are, building skyscrapers in a plummeting elevator.
A ruin, then, is a freeze frame—evidence of how immense the timescale of degradation really is. When you stare at ruin photography, you’re not quite looking at entropy. Or not only. You’re looking at the strange interplay between dissolution and complexity.
That’s level one of the analysis; there’s much more. I’ve never been able to get this into a form I could deliver in prose, but I’m still working on it.
Tom Mullaney is a professor of history at Stanford University and the author of How We Disappear, published by W. W. Norton. He also writes and produces music, and runs a YouTube channel.
A beautiful interview with an excellent historian of technology, on the inevitable decay of everything and what we do in the face of it. Leaves a lot for me to contemplate as an aging parent writing about history, sinking hundreds of hours into a book that few will read and will eventually just be lost on a shelf, while also, at this very moment, trading those hours for time with my kids. Mullaney offers a way to think about this that isn't sad or anything so simple as that, but as part of the human condition to be always building houses on sand.