In the grim darkness of the far future, historians of philosophy will be really into analytic philosophy, and because they're into it, they'll think it's important. And this will make it important! But the reasons they'll be into it will be bad reasons. They'll be into it (1/11)

>> because for the first time in history, we're producing a philosophical tradition that'll be really easy to study. There's no need to digitize the documents because the philosophers are digitizing them themselves. A great deal of it is in one language, English, and often (2/11)

>> it only draws on other work that's in English too. What's more, the philosophers are much more helpful with bibliographic information than previous generations were. Historians will often be able to chase up all of a work's references, each with a single click. (3/11)

>> Earlier philosophers often didn't tell you who they were drawing on, and even if they did they were unhelpfully vague about things. Not so with philosophers today, and the historians will love us for it. So in 400 years' time, when studying the history of philosophy, (4/11)

>> you'll be able to go back and back through history until you get to somewhere around the 1960s, and then everything will quickly become much more difficult. Most people simply won't bother, and so the Father Of Modern Philosophy will be Quine. (5/11)

>> The influences on the philosophers of the late twentieth century will be mysterious and consequently forgotten, and it will seem like a period of innovative geniuses who set the philosophical agenda for the next 400 years. (6/11)

>> Of course, *we* all know that this view of philosophical history is quite wrong, and if it is adopted by the historians of the future then the intellectual future of humanity will be worse for it. What can be done? (7/11)

>> One solution would be to write self-reflective historical works stressing our own unremarkableness, but this strategy is doomed. The people of the future will study our histories as curiosities, noting how people lived through this remarkable period largely unawares. (8/11)

>> The only realistic option is to make ourselves harder to study. We must fill our work with peculiar pop culture references, store our work in clunkier formats, and most of all, we must be less helpful about our references. (9/11)

>> Out with BibTex; in with "that fascinating recent paper by Dr Smith". We must write in more languages, and when writing in English is unavoidable, we must bury our ideas under a mountain of ephemeral slang. To secure our place in history as the unremarkable thinkers (10/11)

>> we are, we must make ourselves unreadable. The intellectual future of humanity depends on it. (11/fin)