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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 😆
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