We increasingly try to fit all our experience into a digital spreadsheet, and written words can be logged, searched, counted, isolated, and edited or deleted far more easily than anything else. They allow us to construct a simplified parallel reality alongside the unbearably ineffable one.

The last remaining option is mal d’archive, the Kang solution: you ease the weight of all this cultural stuff by simply destroying it all. Like nerdery, this impulse has been waiting in the wings for a long time. It is also an emergent property of large stores of information, this drive ‘to burn the archive and to incite amnesia, the thing refuting... See more