What goes up must go down. The baby boom brought us a burst of babies. Statistics will now bring us a burst of deaths. An inverse baby boom. A cadaver boom, I guess.

That much is only slightly new. People get born, age, and die. And it's the burden of those from each generation to bear the wait in the—well, not in a neat, orderly line. Just a crowd waiting to have their number called. Your call will not come “in the order it was received,”¹ to twist a popular phrase slightly. Rather, you're waiting for your number to come up, somewhat at random.

But what's new, and why I write this is the Information Era. It used to be harder to know people. You had to read a lot. You had to work at knowing who people were. To see them, you had to get on a horse and ride, or wait for them to saunter by your home or work.

But now you can just log in and there they all are, in neat little rows, waiting to network with you socially. Not just information but friendship, moving at the speed of light. Our whole society is obsessed with identity and connection, even trivial connection.

Sometimes we look at them edge-wise. Ironically even on Facebook we aren't drawn to see the full set of faces all the time, but we're daily reminded of the number, as if they were stacked up one atop another and we were viewing them from the side, counting the height of the stack. LinkedIn does it too, proudly displaying one's number. I guess size really does make a difference.

But one way or another, we know a lot of people. Maybe not all in the same way, but, one way or another, we know them. And as none of these tools allow us to record who's a close friend and who's not, I suppose neither are they going to be graceful in how they treat their passing either.

And it's not just our 2000 Facebook friends. We pride ourselves in our knowledge of who played what role in which movie. So there's our actual friends, the people we count as friends even though we don't know them, and the people we wish were our friends so we could get into state dinners at the White House or get bailed out by the government when our investments go bad. Taken all together, we know, and know of, a lot of people.

And now, through the wonders of technology, we get to watch them die. We'll know precisely when. Programs will remind us. No longer will we have the luxury of having it happen because we forgot this one or that—that almost-pleasant sense of “what ever happened to so-and-so?” We don't go to obituaries now, they increasingly come to us. The newsmakers will try to figure out who cares. Our friends will notice it on our friends list and helpfully inform us. Waves of grief, helpfully shared, washing over us in increasing numbers and highly concrete detail.

That part is new, I think. People used to die, but they did it privately, passively. No longer. We can thank the information age for that. No place to hide.

And finally there's the question of when. By that I don't mean when will it start, since it has already started. Nor do I mean who will go in what order, since I talked about that already. Rather, I mean the density. Even if it were highly uniform, and it won't be, you could imagine that if they spaced themselves out evenly, and a typical person knew, let's say, 3000 people (just a wild guess), then if one of those 3000 died every other day for twenty years, it would work out just about right. Probably it will get much denser somewhere in the middle of the boom. And some days will be worse than others. I bet those days will be brutal.

And people will want their friends to feel their pain. Isn't that what networking is about? So I'm probably low-balling it. I'm just saying, even without another Haiti or Katrina or Climate Change, it's going to get really crowded on the news pages.

Open Salon, just for example, had better hurry about creating a separate obituary section before this boom sets in because I'm just not sure I can handle a daily barrage of front page brief involving the many great many people I know or know of. There's still the business of life to contend with somewhere in there.

But there is a bright side. Given the “healthy” business we'll be doing in obituaries, not to mention “The Life Story of So-and-so” videos, the government should perhaps think about establishing a new tax on these needs-of-the-moment. At least then they could report a “healthy” growth in a key industry. It could be very good for the economy.