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

We hold that democracy demands equal access to goods, services, and knowledge. The culture of knowledge in America has been a servant of democratic governance. This instrumental view of knowledge meant that three principles would become fundamental to American-style democracy: The press must be free, the government must be open and accountable to t

The default of digital memory—not

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.

We began to think with things.

Digital memory is ubiquitous yet unimaginably fragile, limitless in scope yet inherently unstable.

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

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

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.

in 1997