Preserving the Human Record: Why First-Person Testimony of Technological Turning Points Matters

What the record usually leaves out

Most of what survives from any historical moment was made by institutions: governments, newspapers, corporations, courts. These sources are indispensable, but they are also partial. They tend to preserve the perspectives of the literate, the powerful, and the organized, while the daily experience of ordinary people — how a change actually felt to live through — often goes unrecorded and is lost.

Historians have long recognized this gap. The field of oral history emerged in part to address it, giving recognition to substantial groups of people who had been ignored and enabling engagement with what practitioners call history from below — the history of ordinary lives. As the Institute of Historical Research notes, oral testimony supplements the traditional archive by bringing hidden voices to light and countering the biases inherent in most documentary materials that survived for historians to use.

When societies chose to document ordinary people

There are moments when a society deliberately turned to record the experiences of ordinary people, and the results have proven extraordinarily durable.

The most striking example is the Slave Narrative Collection, gathered between 1936 and 1938 by the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration. Interviewers collected more than 2,300 first-person accounts from formerly enslaved people across seventeen states, along with roughly 500 photographs. The Library of Congress, which holds the collection, describes it as without question the largest body of memories from enslaved people to be found anywhere in the world. Much of it was digitized in 2000–2001 and made publicly accessible as Born in Slavery. These voices, captured near the last possible moment they could be, remain a foundational source for understanding American slavery from the inside.

In Britain, the Mass Observation project, founded in 1937 by an anthropologist, a filmmaker, and a poet, set out to create an anthropology of ourselves. It recruited around 500 untrained volunteer observers to keep diaries and answer open-ended questionnaires, documenting the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain before, during, and after the Second World War. The archive it produced — now held at the University of Sussex and revived in 1981 — is used by historians precisely because it captured the mundane texture of life that official records omit.

More recently, StoryCorps, founded in 2003, has recorded conversations from more than 700,000 participants. Its recordings are preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress — one of the first born-digital collections the Center accepted — and it is described as the largest single collection of human voices ever gathered. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Library of Congress and StoryCorps partnered specifically to document how ordinary people experienced that disruption, an acknowledgment that turning points are worth recording as they happen.

Why contemporaneous testimony is worth more later

The common thread is timing. Testimony gathered during or shortly after a transformation captures something that later reconstruction cannot recover: the uncertainty, the unresolved feeling of not yet knowing how things would turn out.

The Born in Slavery collection exists only because interviewers reached elderly former slaves in the 1930s; a decade later, those voices would have been gone. Mass Observation's diaries are valued because they recorded wartime life without the distortion of hindsight — an invaluable record left by people who did not yet know the outcome. Memory reshaped by later events is a different, thinner thing than a contemporaneous account.

The present transition

Societies are now living through a technological turning point of a similar order in the shift toward artificial intelligence. As with earlier transformations, a great deal is being recorded institutionally — corporate announcements, policy debates, technical papers, market data. What is far less systematically preserved is how ordinary people are experiencing it: workers whose tasks are changing, students, teachers, writers, people encountering these tools for the first time in daily life, and those who feel excluded from the change entirely.

The historical pattern is instructive here. The perspectives most likely to go undocumented are exactly the ones later historians most wish they had. If the AI transition follows the default — where the record is written by the organized and the powerful — future accounts will know a great deal about what companies and governments did, and comparatively little about what the change felt like to the people who lived inside it.

The value of documenting this moment from ordinary people's perspective is not that any single account is authoritative. It is that, in aggregate and captured contemporaneously, such accounts form a record that cannot be reassembled after the fact. The WPA narratives, the Mass Observation diaries, and the StoryCorps recordings share a quiet lesson: the human experience of a turning point is preserved only if someone chooses, at the time, to preserve it. What is not recorded now will simply not be available to those who come later — and they, like us, will want to know how it actually felt.