Memory
My current view is that we’ve discovered a kind of natural universal memory phenomenon that’s a property of all matter, living and non-living. A natural tendency of information to get tangled up with space, time, and matter that allows it to become experientially self-reporting. It’s weird to think of memory outside of the context of living beings... See more
Capacities
And so there are many wells which, like Madron, are named now for the saints – but under their shallow surface ripples lie the deep, clear traces of far older stories.
Sharon Blackie • If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging
[Shared Memories]
The way we remember the events that happen on the internet is different than reading a book. Information circulates and gets stored in a way that incorporates personal narratives as documentation, combining textuality with elements of oral storytelling. Bits of text and image serve as artifacts that help piece together complex... See more
The way we remember the events that happen on the internet is different than reading a book. Information circulates and gets stored in a way that incorporates personal narratives as documentation, combining textuality with elements of oral storytelling. Bits of text and image serve as artifacts that help piece together complex... See more
Capacities
most of the memory a system uses isn’t its own. … The same is true of humans. Language, culture, norms, rituals, documents—all of these constitute a collective memory space we navigate constantly. Our own memory is just one small node in a vast network of external scaffolding—books, browsers, friends, feeds. … Shared memory is the terrain;
... See moreFrances Yates’ The Art of Memory: describes how Cicero helped popularize this story in De Oratore, his 55 BCE treatise that introduced five canons of rhetoric: Invention [included the memorization of facts], Arrangement, Style, Memory, and Delivery. … Cicero described Memory as something at once more dynamic and more intimate than Invention. It
... See moreIn the past (particularly in my Breaking Smart essays), I have referred to technologies that induce cosmopolises as soft technologies, but now I prefer the term memory technologies. While all technologies leave traces behind that can be “read” as texts, not all technologies induce intentional modes of remembering and knowing, or new modes of... See more
Capacities
Welcome to the Cosmopolis Venkatesh Rao 8.12.2025
The Articulation of Memory
Unlike the cosmopolis of gunpowder, or the cosmopolis of sail (which emerged in the same period), the cosmopolis of print was based on a powerful memory technology. As such, it subsumed the others, and overrode their logics where they were in conflict.
In scribal culture, it is doubtful whether the pen was trulymightier... See more
Unlike the cosmopolis of gunpowder, or the cosmopolis of sail (which emerged in the same period), the cosmopolis of print was based on a powerful memory technology. As such, it subsumed the others, and overrode their logics where they were in conflict.
In scribal culture, it is doubtful whether the pen was trulymightier... See more
Welcome to the Cosmopolis
Welcome to the Cosmopolis Venkatesh Rao 8.12.2025
The way we remember the events that happen on the internet is different than reading a book. Information circulates and gets stored in a way that incorporates personal narratives as documentation, combining textuality with elements of oral storytelling. Bits of text and image serve as artifacts that help piece together complex narratives.
The Lore
... See moreThe answers to the biggest questions we have about identity, story, and God can only be answered in relation to memory. Without memory, we are forced to rely solely on ideas and suggestions to make sense of who we are, as opposed to the concrete.