Attention Machines and Future Politics Highlight

a key component of these ecologies will be the (relative) loss of memory as such. This is not to say all memory will vanish, merely that we will “forget” about memory in decisive ways: we will no longer guard it, or safeguard it, or organize our collective lives around its externalized systems, as we do now. This is already starting, and we are already seeing distinctive cognitive effects: individual memory and collective memory are weakening across numerous dimensions. With literacy loss, historical consciousness is beginning to unravel. Institutional memory is being bulk deleted.

This is not the “work” of any agent: this is a structural and systemic phenomenon, which comes from a shift in our cognitive ecology. It is inextricable from the broader decline of textual literacy — which, in its advanced form, is returning to an elite craft — and is already well underway. In a sense, we have already forgotten about memory and its importance.