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

We must be as adept at forgetting what is no longer true or useful as we are at remembering what is valuable and necessary.

our information technologies all derive from the single insight that matter records the history of the universe because it is a slow, cold form of information. The universe writes its own autobiography in atoms.

Information has value to the extent that it has the potential for reuse.

This is the moral hazard Socrates warned against—that by alienating our knowledge, making it “external to us,” we have bought an immense measure of power over the world at the expense of having power over ourselves.

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

We began to travel backward in time to understand causation, and forward in time to make predictions.

Culture provides the large-scale framework for memory and meaning. It aids in the creation of new knowledge, but it also acts as a filter that over time determines what is of long-term value from the social perspective.

During consolidation, content is abstracted from its native context and made available for reuse in other contexts.

Before the twenty-first century, we relied on a system of preserving memories that complemented our internal memory. One of the breathtakingly simple advantages of the cuneiform, scroll, or printed page was that the memories inscribed on them were not easily changed, overwritten, or erased.