The Internet Is Destroying Our Memory and History

Online life is colonizing other forms of information-sharing.

Think of the internet as kudzu. It not only takes over everything, it steals the life-force—the energy and space—other things require to survive.

This is Part 1 of a two-part series on the internet and memory. This one is free. The second one, which will be more about the history of people’s attempt to control memory, won’t be.

A few months ago, I picked up a friend whom I hadn’t seen in a few weeks from a train station. As we drove, we shared recent things from our lives: what we’d experienced, what we were thinking about. Except, we began to realize, most of those things were things we’d seen online. “Did you see that article in the New Yorker?” Or, even worse: “Did you see that meme on Twitter,” and “did you see that Reel on Instagram?”

As soon as we realized this, we hung our heads in shame, and made a concerted effort to stop mentioning the internet and instead catch up about only what was happening in our real lives. Except, we realized very quickly, that seemed much harder.

It’s not only that we’d both been in particularly bad places with our respective internet addictions, it’s that those addictions appeared to have erased everything surrounding them. Our individual lives had been supplanted with a shared internet memory of memes and articles and videos that, yes, provided us with a basis for conversation, but also seemingly took away from us everything else that mattered—namely, our own lives.

I began to see this collective internet memory everywhere: in the social media slang, usually bastardized from queer and black cultures, that had become a quick way to get a laugh, or simply a way to fill dead space at parties (I cannot count how many times have I said something, expecting a followup question from my interlocutor, only to hear “slay” or “tea” or “boots” followed by nothing (and I don’t want to think about how many times I’ve done the same thing.)); in the way memes became a kind of shorthand for conversation and the sharing of feelings at bars or in friends’ living rooms (“OMG that deeply personal thing you just told me is just like a video I saw.”).

Except to call it “collective internet memory” is probably a misnomer, because beyond its most superficial layer of friends and strangers sharing things with each other, there’s nothing collective about it. The internet’s inner workings are extremely concentrated and top-down. It is, essentially, five corporations in a trenchcoat. Or, really, five corporations behind a projector, projecting what seems like an infinite, kaleidoscopic horizon onto our eyeballs, but one that is in actuality much of the same shit over and over again, and shit that, not coincidentally, is turning the world swiftly rightward.

If we think of our time as a zero-sum game (and it is, because we will all die), then what effect does it have on our minds for our limited spaces for communal understandings of the world (e.g. interpersonal conversations) to be colonized by this for-profit machine run by psychopathic billionaires?

The infection of our conversation by the internet might seem innocuous, or even cutesy and fun, but if even the most offline thing you can do—speak with other people in the flesh—has been populated by the preferred language of the ruling class (which is not to say that they want us to say “slay” but to say that they want us to be stupid, which is maybe the same thing), then it stands to reason that something fundamental is at risk within our systems of human communication: the ability to communicate without the influence of those who want to maintain the status quo.

Take the conversation I had with my friend, and blow it up to a global scale: the internet acts as an Amnesia Machine. It is not only that it provides content that stupefies us, and algorithmically filters people towards fascism, but that in its constant deluge has the power to help us forget other forms of knowledge-making and sharing. The internet is a technology of memory erasure, a deterritorializing mega-force that helps us forget our actual surroundings and histories, and replaces them with ones algorithmically generated by and beneficial to the richest people in the universe.

The more the internet becomes our way of understanding the world, the worse the world gets.

And now the world is getting worse!

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It's the Stupidity, Stupid

Labubu Lobotomy

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The New York Times has an interesting story about how 50 years after the death of Francisco Franco, Spaniards, and especially young Spaniards, are starting to revise their view of the dictator. Twenty percent of the country’s youth now have a positive view of his reign. The culprit is, of course, largely social media, where far-right influencers have flooded people’s feeds with pro-Franco content.

But another way to say this is that the internet has helped erase the memory of all the horrific things Franco did. If you were not alive to experience those things, and if most of your information comes from the internet, and if that internet is run by people who are likely sympathetic to Franco or at least unwilling to restrain the content of people who are, then other narratives get lost to history. The internet, like an invasive weed, overtakes other forms of information, ones that are less conducive to a techno-libertarian world (see: forms of information created by liberalism-supporting institutions like journalism and government education).

This control of information is the often explicit goal of the far-right billionaires: Elon Musk created “Grokipedia” with the explicit goal of challenging the influence of Wikipedia, which, with its reliance on journalism and primary sources, is based in actual history as opposed to the made-up history (see: conspiracy theories) so-often favored by white supremacists. The site makes reference to explicitly white nationalist sources 42 times.

Other billionaires are less obvious in their goals but no less (and probably much more) successful. What is ChatGPT except a memory-erasure machine? By severely de-emphasizing the sources it relies on to spew out its content, it trains people to become less familiar with where information actually comes from, and more dependent on itself, which is to say more dependent on the information it allows through, information ultimately controlled by right-wing-friendly billionaires.

It’s no coincidence that the internet has been found to weaken people’s memory to the point it has a term in academia—“digital amnesia”—because this is one of its explicit purposes. The more we rely on Google to remember everything for us, to do research for us, to even autocomplete sentences for us (even though, in my experience, that feature has never, ever, ever been faster than just typing out three or four words on your own), the less we can remember how to live our lives without the help of these billionaires overlords.

Their mission is succeeding: people have become less skilled at doing their own research, and less trustful of actual information than of information filtered through algorithms. Forty Five percent of U.S. teens now think journalists do more harm to democracy than good, but have very little problem getting their “news” from streamers and influencers (who are usually just spewing bastardized and versions of the news that these teens seem to distrust, twisted into whatever shape that the billionaire-backed platforms algorithmically deem supportable).

One of the greatest tricks ever pulled was convincing us that the internet is some neutral technology, as opposed to a platform controlled by people with a vested interest in controlling us. Perhaps now that the consequences of this control are becoming obvious, we will have less of a problem recognizing that our digital lives are not only being corrupted, but corrupting the diminishing real lives we have left.

And that’s tea, lol.