Geek tragedy and website pensions
8:04pm, 12th June 2007
Dave mentioned yesterday how RMS saw himself as a tragic character who would ultimately be remembered as some guy who wrote some code in Linux. As of today, searches for “Richard Stallman” on the major search engines return his personal website first, but Wikipedia’s entry on him is a close second. When his main loop finally returns 0, and his personal site is silenced, the army of wikiholics will ensure his entry stays fresh and highly-ranked, and the true geek tragedy will be complete: to be out-googlejuiced by your own biographers.
I wonder if I could make money operating an endowment scheme for geeks. Mr Soon-to-be-spending-the-rest-of-his-long-assed-eternity-in-the-ground supplies a principal to be invested, the returns of which are used to keep his online operations running indefinitely. It’d be a pension for websites! I’m not aware of any dead geeks with prominent personal websites, but the beards are lengthening as the seconds tick by, and it’s only a matter of time…
Your time is past
Your life no more
That needn’t mean you 404!
Can I write this in my Will for you to do for me? I’ll leave the passwords in the layer’s safe.
How much do you think the principle should be?
Since I’m not actually a hedge fund manager or anything like that, I’d assume a long-term rate of return of 5%. Further assuming you’re happy being hosted on a DreamHost-level service, the fund will need to produce about $120 a year. So a lump sum of $2400 is required. I’d have to start paying out the returns as soon as you died, so it would be in my interest to keep you alive for as long as possible, pocketing that yearly $120 until it’s finally necessary. More complicated schemes might end up giving me a financial incentive to bring that end closer :)
But of course I’m not planning on getting into this business just yet, and DreamHost-level service is not too onerous, so I’d be happy to do this for you for free :)
The real money is in providing higher service level agreements and applying more actuarial magic to the problem. You’d probably need some mechanism to deal with the possibility of going out of business and taking your e-graveyard with you - I’d certainly want some assurance that my affairs were being looked after professionally, since six feet under is no position to sue from.
So yeah, I’ll look after your sites for you, but I can’t as yet provide any guarantees as to what happens after I die too. For now, I’ll just try not to let that happen.