The Internet Isn't Forever

How We're Being Rewired For Forgetting

Memory-holing has been with us long before Orwell coined the term in 1949. Stefan Zweig, for example, describes an episode of mass forgetting in his memoir of Vienna before the Great War, The World of Yesterday. When Germany declared war in 1914, the public was united in a patriotic fervor that transcended “social station, language, class and religion.” The war became the public religion, a way for legions to imbue their lives with larger meaning:

Every single individual felt his own ego enhanced; he was no longer the isolated human being he had been before, he was a part of the whole, one of the people, and his person, formerly ignored, had acquired significance.

One of those individuals was Ernst Lissauer, writer of “succinct, cogent and harsh little poems,” yet personally warm-hearted and “the kindest man imaginable” to Zweig. A Jewish immigrant, Lissauer “believed more fervently in Germany than the most fervent of native Germans” – so much so that, despite his corpulence, he tried to enlist.  Rejected, he served his country by writing and publishing Hymn of Hate for England, which you can read here. 

As hymns of hate go, it’s a banger.  To my modern sensibilities it’s comically over-the-top, more like a parody of hate than a call to arms. How can a 21^st-Century reader, well-familiar with failed wars and lying governments, take these lines as anything but as a spoof of nationalistic furor, couched in a Dr. Suess poem?

You we will hate with a lasting hate,
We will never forego our hate,
Hate by water and hate by land,
Hate of the head and hate of the hand,
Hate of the hammer and hate of the crown,
Hate of seventy millions choking down.
We love as one, we hate as one,
We have one foe and one alone--
ENGLAND!

Germans in 1914, however, not only took the poem sincerely but adored it. Hymn was printed in the papers, read in schools, memorized by enlisted men.  It was set to music and performed in theaters across Germany. The Kaiser even awarded Lissauer a special Order for his efforts.  As Zweig tells it, “there was not a single one of the seventy million Germans populating the country . . . who did not know the Hymn of Hate for England from the first line to the last.”

That was at the dawn of World War I.  But after the War? When Germany was defeated, humiliated and crippled? Well, Zweig describes it briskly and brutally:

Overnight, Ernst Lissauer had won the most fiery reputation that any poet ever did in that war.  Later it was to burn him like the shirt of Nessus.  For no sooner than the war was over. . . than they did all they could to disown a poem calling for eternal hostility to England.  And to absolve themselves of any blame, they pilloried poor Lissauer . . . as the man solely responsible for the crazy hysteria of hatred that in point of fact was shared by everyone in 1914.  All who had praised him then now turned ostentatiously away from him.  The papers stopped printing his poems and when he appeared among his literary colleagues a dismayed silence fell.

A bloodlust that gripped an entire nation, down the memory-hole.

Decades later, in 1935, Columbia student Thomas Merton experienced another, smaller instance of memory-holing. As he recounts in The Seven Story Mountain, Merton and two hundred or so of his fellow leftist undergrads ditched classes to wage a “Peace Strike” against war.  Merton wryly notes that, since he was already cutting classes, he didn’t exactly have the same skin in the game as, say, a picketing factory worker that stood to lose his job. Nonetheless, he and his compatriots gathered in a gym to take the “Oxford Pledge”: a staunch refusal to fight for one’s country or in any war whatsoever.  As Merton tells it, the Pledge

was taken by hundreds of thousands of students in all kinds of schools and colleges and universities with some of the solemnity that might make it look as if they intended to bind themselves by it – the way we were doing at Columbia that day.  All this was usually inspired by the Reds, who were very fond of the Oxford Pledge that year . . .

However, the next year the Spanish Civil war broke out.  The first thing I heard about that war was that one of the chief speakers at the 1935 Peace Strike, and one who had been so enthusiastic about this glorious pledge that we would never fight in any war, was now fighting for the Red Army against Franco, and all the N.S.L. and the Young Communists were going around picketing everybody who seemed to think that the war in Spain was not holy and sacrosanct and a crusade for the workers against Fascism.

These anecdotes not only document memory-holing but call into question the usefulness of the term.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines a memory hole as an imaginary place where inconvenient or unpleasant information is put and quickly forgotten. The kicker is that it’s a place, suggesting whatever truth is stuffed down there is still retained, despite being tucked away. An intrepid spelunker can descend into the memory hole and retrieve the truth if he has the inclination.

But to my mind, the term “memory hole” teases us with the false hope that memory still exists.  What Zweig and Merton describe isn’t the suppression of truth but its dissolving.  Like a seeming solid – a block of salt or ice – what once was known disintegrates in the current of collective thought and passion.  There’s no need to dispose of truth in a “hole” when our brains erase it to begin with.  Moreover – and I’m really trying not to be a bummer, here – the internet is making this process of dissolving much faster and far more seamless.  If our brains are repositories – of information, memory, truth – the internet is Bleach Bit.

But . . . Receipts!

The Internet is forever, we’ve been told for years, now, and in one sense that’s true.  Any bit of information uploaded to the web, from a scholar’s flawed research paper to a politician’s Tweet to a photo of a celebrity embracing his pregnant spouse, becomes preserved in digital amber.  Even post-deletion, internet trawlers armed with screenshots and the Wayback Machine can dredge up what was intended to be erased and forgotten.  Thus the scholar is exposed as a charlatan, the politician as a hypocrite, and the celebrity as a two-timer who was having a sordid affair while his wife was pregnant. In online parlance, this is known as “having receipts” and it’s treated as a coup.

Yet in another sense, the Internet really isn’t forever.  What irks me about the notion of “receipts” is that it presupposes we have the depth of memory to even search for them in the first place.  The impulse to search for the past is contingent upon the past being stored in our long-term memory – the very thing being terminally online is eroding.

Author Nicholas Carr was onto this in 2011, when he published The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.  In a nutshell, Carr argues our short-term, working memory is being overloaded by the onslaught of disconnected and brief bits of information constantly fed to us by the internet, email, texts and the like.  This creates a problem much larger than momentary distraction and lack of focus.  Working memory flows into long-term memory, which Carr says is not merely a storage facility for the data we encounter.  Rather, long-term memory is where “schemas” are formed –thought structures that not only enable us to retain a memory, but to put it into context, associate it with other memories, and create “big picture” narratives and ideas.

While the science is still out on exactly how much info our working memory can handle, the consensus is that it’s not a whole heckuva lot.  Carr describes working memory as a mere thimble that feeds into the capacious bathtub of long-term memory:

The information flowing into our working memory at any given moment is called our ‘cognitive load.’ When the load exceeds our mind’s ability to store and process the information – when the water overflows the thimble – we’re unable to retain the information or to draw connections with the information already stored in our long-term memory.  We can’t translate the new information into schemas.  Our ability to learn suffers and our understanding remains shallow.

When the thimble overflows, in other words, information doesn’t even rise to the status of working memory; ergo, there is nothing to be memory-holed.  On social media, for instance, we’re the targets (and instigators) of a relentless onslaught of random images and thought-snippets.   Any fact that tries to find a foothold in working memory gets washed away in the great flow of digital diarrhea.

But so what? you might retort.  That’s what algorithms are for.  Off-loading the retention of facts to search engines is one of the great boons of the Internet: It frees up cognitive space in our brains to remember only the information that is salient, interesting and useful to us, allowing for greater productivity and, ultimately, greater innovation.

According to a 2018 scholarly article in World Psychiatry, the crux of this argument is that the online world acts as “a form of external or ‘transactive memory.’”:

Transactive memory has been an integral part of human societies for millennia, and refers to the process by which people opt to outsource information to other individuals within their families, communities, etc., such that they are able to just remember the source of the knowledge, rather than attempting to store all of this information themselves . . .

However, it is becoming clear that the Internet actually presents something entirely novel and distinct from previous transactive memory systems.  Crucially, the Internet seems to bypass the “transactional” aspect that is inherent to other forms of cognitive offloading in two ways.  First, the Internet does not place any responsibility on the user to retain unique information for others to draw upon (as would typically be required in human societies).  Second, unlike other transactive memory stores, the Internet acts as a single entity that is responsible for holding and retrieving virtually all factual information, and thus does not require individuals to remember what exact information is externally stored, or even where it is located.  In this way, the Internet is becoming a “supernormal stimulus” for transactive memory – making all other options for cognitive offloading (including books, friends, community) become redundant. (emphasis added).

The foregoing raises a serious question about cognitive off-loading: Who, or what, exactly, are we ceding memory to? Studies already exist demonstrating that the ability to access information online enhances our memory for where facts can be retrieved, as opposed to our memory of the facts themselves. But in previous societies, the wheres of fact storage – libraries, colleges and universities, courts, even people – were at least embedded in systems that prioritized communal knowledge and a neutral means to search and access it.  There was no search rigging in the card catalog.  You often had to trawl through miles of records indexes and microfiche to find what you were looking for.  But the upside of that laboriousness was that you also stumbled upon relevant information you may have otherwise overlooked, information that might not be spit back at you on Page One of a Google search.  Information that you might, with any luck, actually remember.

And, let’s face it, ceding facts to transactive memory does mean ceding them to Google, or Twitter/X, or Substack, or whatever your preferred algo may be.  We tell ourselves any and all information we need is out there, “on the Internet,” accessible with a few keystrokes and a click of the search button.  The reality is that any and all online information is curated, made more or less accessible on the basis of popularity, profitability, and political agenda. To paraphrase Thomas Merton, we’ve relinquished memory to a human-operated digital machine

whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible.

This can’t be good at all.

So, to summarize: We’re mired in technology that prevents memory formation. Which means we’ve offloaded memory to the Internet.  Which means that we are particularly vulnerable – perhaps more so now than at any time in history – to manipulation, this time by the factions competing to control tech.  We have a lot less “memory” to “hole”, and the astonishing part is how eagerly we’ve embraced the technologies behind our own cognitive atrophy.

And what’s to be done? Wholesale rejection of the Internet, obviously, is neither feasible or wise (although I have days when I wonder).  But perhaps we can reduce our exposure.  Perhaps we can really do it, this time, and turn the screen off two hours before bedtime.  Maybe the next time we Google, for the umpteenth time, a recipe, or an address, or a set of directions, we can take a minute to memorize them and make them a handy part of our cognitive toolkit.  Maybe we can take a minute to memorize anything, actually – a poem, the order of American presidents, the number Pi.  We can flex our brains to compensate against the estimated 10 IQ points lost due to incessant email and phone distraction.  We can write things down by hand, engage in long reads of printed books, keep hard copies of articles in physical files.

Perhaps most importantly, when we log online and find our “every nerve” excited and “at the highest pitch of artificial tension,” our every desire strained to the limit, we can pause and ask ourselves: for whose benefit?