It took nearly 70 years for the tech to catch up to Bush's vision. Of course, 1940s technology wasn't up to the task of recording a person's every conversation and everything they read. Memex, Bush wrote in The Atlantic in 1945, would be a 'device in which an individual stores all his books, records and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.' Read more: The Army Is Working on Brain Hacks to Help Soldiers Deal With Information Overload In 1945, a government scientist named Vannevar Bush described an idea he termed 'Memex.' It was, in some ways, a prescient flash forward to smartphones. The ideas behind LifeLog are much, much older than the program itself. A failed military cyber-diary from 15 years ago was, in a way, a preview of our smartphone-addicted, Facebooking, government-surveilled present.Īt the same time, LifeLog was 'a cautionary tale regarding privacy controversies,” its creator Douglas Gage told me during a series of phone and email interviews. Barely a year after it began, the LifeLog program abruptly ended, effectively shamed out of existence by privacy-advocates and the media.Īnd then, over the following decade, much of what LifeLog aimed to achieve happened, anyway. But today, it's just a footnote in tech history. LifeLog arguably was years ahead of its time.

It was potential all-seeing government surveillance before anyone worried about the NSA or had heard of Edward Snowden. LifeLog was an iPhone before there were iPhones, social media before there was social media.

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