35. Memory Genres 🔗

Here’s a spectrum of “memory” genres

1. Autobiography
2. Family history
3. Personal memoir
4. Subcultural history
5. Public life memoir
6. Participant history

Prediction: All of it is in trouble. Our cultural memory processes are breaking.

1. Autobiography is in trouble because it’s gone quantum. Living and narrating have gotten entangled live for anyone whose life might be of interest to others. You can’t just live an interesting life and then write it down. There’s a competing record of how you performed it live.

2. Family history is reality TV (it has been Kardashianized)

This has been kinda dead for a while anyway. Families have been a poor unit of broader cultural memory since hereditary nobility kinda became obsolete as a type of storage.

3. Personal memoir is suffering an odd fate — people are no longer sufficiently entangled in each other’s lives for long enough for that to be an interesting way to capture memories. It’s better to take a different slice, like the history of a neighborhood.

4. Subcultural history is probably the only gainer here, but average size of meaningful subcultures has been declining. As memory, it’s like replacing 10 1TB discs with 10k 1GB discs. The memories are being captured in a different frequency range. We’re high-pass filtering.

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.

6. And finally, regular history is just kinda toast. Long story (ironic huh?)

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.

This is the rough collective version of this individual-scale argument The Age of Diffraction

This idea is probably much clearer in my head than it is to anyone else 🤔

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

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.

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.

The log level shall reign supreme

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.

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 😆