Conversation

Replying to
5. Public life memoirs are falling prey to fake news, weaponized revelations and whistleblowing, and a Rashomon effect. It’s unclear if live experiences are being captured in a way that allows for definitive accounts.
2
10
The future of collective memory is multitemporal. Starting ~2000, increasingly, history will be seen to have a multiple personality disorder. No canonical history plus wistful counterfactuals. Just a superposition of non-consensus histories. Like a diffraction pattern.
2
49
Simplest example I can think of: accounts of Obama administration at all these levels will harmonize (including the hostile ones) in a way the equivalent Trump corpus won’t. It’s a fundamentally higher entropy story. Smaller ‘sum > parts’ narrative surplus to form grand narrative
2
10
Basically there won’t be a way to adopt a point of view that could call default or canonical. Only a bunch of alts. There will be nothing it is like to be a “spectator from nowhere” of history. If you try to write for this point of view there will be no readers for it.
1
16
All history will be revisionist history basically, with the role of default being taken over by a data ubiquity that tells no story, but undermines all of them.
1
11
Collective memory is a form of identity creation. A way to create a point of view that can be adopted by others in the future. That’s how you engineer read/write/append access to it. This is now becoming untenable except as solipsism.
1
13
To quote myself: narratives tell archetypes how to evolve, archetypes tell narratives how to curve. Narratives become indexical to self perpetuate by enabling identities with rewrite permission. Soon: all history is revisionist, all integration of memory is appropriation 😆
Show replies
Replying to
History has always been revisionist and there have always been competing viewpoints in every age. The only reason we haven’t internalized that is because eventually most are rendered irrelevant (through technology, historiography, war, etc).
1
1
Replying to
Seems paradoxical that as record-keeping has improved, collective memory has disintegrated. I supposed it has always been an abstraction that does not withstand the refractive, subjective nature of the historical reality.
1
2