The Mistake That Is History
In the Information Age, we forget the importance of forgetting things
I know I’m not the only one who feels like the overload of information available to us now, especially when it comes to our own history, is more a detriment than anything in the way most of us interact with it. Our collective knowledge feels no longer like a lived-in cultural memory bank. It feels like a static, hollow, chaotic, and non-specific thing, alien to all of ourselves and inspiring to only a dwindling few. Our knowledge is so vast, and its access so easy, that it loses the same quality we’d lose if we were all to become immortal; that is, being treasured for finiteness. It is everywhere, all of the time; why bother with it now?
The non-specificity (or really, the hopelessly neutral) nature of modern record-keeping is ironic in that it arose as a direct result of the violent conquest of the rest of the world by a militantly homogenizing political force in the European colonial empires. But it also, as philosophical revolution over intellectual overturning has found out, doesn’t work; it can never be truly neutral, and its end, being infinite data collection, takes us nowhere. And so, for the first time in history, really, most people in the world are living their lives under systems — governments, social orders, religious, ideologies and the like…
