When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future

Digital data are completely dependent on machines to render them accessible to human perception. In turn, those machines are completely dependent on uninterrupted supplies of energy

The eerie certainty we have of existing as separate creatures in a world full of things that are not us, our ability to create abstract symbolic representations of our mental states and use language to communicate these interior states of mind—all

Yet quite abruptly and without warning, at the beginning of the twenty-first century we embarked on a vast natural experiment, rendering obsolete our forty-thousand-year project to cheat death by using objects to hold the contents of our minds.

This is memory’s task of retrospection, to integrate the knowledge that we have, to impute a sense of cause and effect to the events in our lives, and to offer a sense of meaning.

But the sense of meaning only arises from the context of what we perceive. Interactive timelines, maps, charts, and infographics are common now in presentations and online newspapers. They allow people to grasp the import of information quickly by arranging data schematically in a variety of contexts to reveal relationships.

Like poetry, mathematics, and music, good memory relies on patterns that simultaneously constrain content and suggest meaning.

He came to see life as a state of becoming, not being.

Memory begins to focus less on learning new things than on integrating all that we have experienced and known to provide a sense of continuity between past and present selves.

The cluster of causes that reinforced the forensic shift is not hard to isolate: the embrace of empirical methods and materialist theories to understand natural causes and effects; the harnessing of that understanding by economic systems that apply this knowledge to create ever finer instruments and accumulate greater amounts of evidence; the dedic