THE INTERNET NEVER FORGETS

Forgetting is one of the means by which society heals itself but there is no chance of that online, suggests James Marriott.

It is a terrible thing never to forget. In the great Argentine writer orge Luis Borges’ story Funes the Memorious, a young man named Ireneo Funes is condemned to remember every moment he has ever lived. is present, his past, his most trivial memories are constantly “so rich and so clear” to him that his life has become unbearable.

Not in any of the most dazzling, most fiercely splendid cities in the history of the world, Borges writes – not in Babylon, or London or New ork – has anyone ever been assailed by “the heat and pressure of a reality as inexhaustible as that which battered Funes day and night”.

I no longer find it possible to read Borges’ story without thinking of the internet. Our words and gestures fade in memory. Old photographs are lost. But online every dumb picture, every unfinished conversation and every idle feud is preserved as perfectly as one of Funes’ memories. hese things go on existing, as vividly, as angrily and as pointlessly as they did when you hit the enter key and closed the witter tab in righteous disgust. here is no forgetting, no mercy of slow disappearance. Like Funes, we are condemned to live in the appalling glare of an eternal present. I think this has changed us profoundly.

I read recently of the rediscovery of antisemitic messages sent by the cricketer Azeem Rafiq as a teenager. ithout the internet those messages could never have been found. hat nasty fragment of the past would have been lost irrevocably. But the internet did not just preserve those messages, I think it changed them too. he immediacy of the internet – the way it preserves stuff, keeps it instantly available, ties it to the same “profile” you still use now – makes even the distant past belong to the present in a way that would have once seemed incomprehensible. For many of Rafiq’s severer critics, there was no difference between the teenager and the man. Online everything exists equally and at once.

In this land of no forgetting you do not exist moment to moment, in possession of that liquid and mutable thing, a human personality. ou are instead a kind of archival aggregate of every clever and every fatuous thing you have ever said. Online, we are not so much people as vast, unwieldy filing cabinets waiting to be browsed by our friends or raided by our enemies.

It is from here that so much of the fury of the internet derives. Like Funes, we suffer the heat and pressure of an inexhaustible reality. A journalist I know remarked to me recently that every time you get into serious trouble on witter, all the stupid and embarrassing things you have ever done resurface and the site’s users become as angry and horrified by those stupid and embarrassing things as if they had happened yesterday, not years ago.

No online enemy offends you in this moment only. A scroll through an antagonist’s profile will inevitably reveal an almost inexhaustible history of contemptuous ideas and views to hate – and to return to regularly. I occasionally (more often than I should look up cruel things people have said about me on

witter. And every time I look, I feel hurt, as if the cruel thing was said today, not months in the past.

Features such as Facebook’s “on this day” contribute to the atmosphere of chaotic simultaneity.

emories of parties, of funerals, of old lovers arrive without invitation and without reason. he past lurches meaninglessly towards us, as real and vivid as the present.

As the academic iktor ayer ch nberger writes in Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, his interesting book about the internet and memory “For millennia, human beings have lived in a world of forgetting. Behaviour, societal mechanisms and processes and values have incorporated and reflected that fact.” Forgetting is a blunt moral instrument but for centuries it has afforded an invaluable kind of justice. Reputations heal, old fights burn themselves out. oo much memory is paralysing. Only by forgetting is it possible to advance. he culture war is the characteristic war of the internet age because it is a war of endless remembering the same battles over race and gender fought year after year, the same scandals interminably revived, the same villains somehow always at the centre of it all.

Incidentally, I have sometimes wondered does the iconoclasm of statue topplers come at least partly from this new internet derived idea that there should be no forgetting, that the past exists simultaneously with the present and is there to be trawled for evidence of moral wrong with just the same fervour

Our modern chaos is the chaos of never forgetting. “y memory, sir, is like a garbage heap,” Funes says.

he story’s narrator observes that Funes has almost lost the power of thought, for “to think is to ... forget differences, to generalise, to abstract” and “in the teeming world of Ireneo Funes there was nothing but particulars, virtually immediate particulars”.

he internet is an anarchy of immediate particulars. One ancient stupid tweet defines a person more than any considered and abstracted notion of their whole personality.

Funes was merely condemned never to forget. e are doubly condemned, for we are also condemned never to be forgotten. As ayer ch nberger points out, “o be preserved forever” was the legend the KGB stamped on the files of its political prisoners. It was meant as a kind of curse.