I love this. Another lens I find useful for examining digital forgetfulness is bound up with the word "flow" itself and the temporary suspension of self-consciousness associated with that state. Gamblers seek the "zone" of technologized numbness because, perhaps, it's a way of slipping outside of time and angst and memory. Or, perhaps, these are rationalizations of a biochemical loop they're snared in.
Pathologically avoiding actuality does much harm. But even doom-scrolling can be, in its way, adaptive: a refuge or respite from overload; a semi-attending method for sampling the algorithmic totality. I worry, though, that it breeds dependence and denial; that we forget how to be fully present to ourselves. We know there is a world beyond the cave's shadows, but cannot conceive of coping with it.
Regarding your footnote on the etymology of "remember" -- there's a beautiful poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves," which draws on this idea:
"For earth ' her being has unbound, her dapple is at an end, as- / tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; ' self ín self steepèd and páshed – quite / Disremembering, dísmémbering, ' áll now."
Here’s an example of the Image of Things - a friend of mine was buying a couch. The purpose of the couch was for sitting and hosting friends and family, including her little nephew who she loves dearly. Unfortunately the image of things got in the way of the purpose of things and she bought a beautiful white couch. Now she is under stress whenever her nephew visits and can’t fully be present in the moment with him, for fear of this white couch getting stained. Again I think of Christopher Alexander and his meditations on “the quality without a name.” If things are to be truly alive they must evoke the experiences they are intended to evoke: they have to be about function and purpose, not image. We have to fight to remember this now.
I often wonder if screen time is inherently lethargic (unmemorable) in that our memories of using screens collapse into vague super-memories. All the time spent reading the news in bed becomes one blurry experience. All the time spent watching videos. I have an easier time recalling reading a physical book at a specific time and place than I do any individual Kindle session.
I love your writing. I was sharing a thought recently, that the biggest threat of our time is to come to mistake this digital world of illusions for the real world, and to forget which is which. The Image of Things is eating us alive. I often imagine a secret little population of resisters awake in a sea of people who have been lulled to sleep in this stream of constant distraction. Let's keep our eyes open, facing the land of the living.
An excerpt from a piece in The Guardian, April 29,2025 that speaks to this essay's points: "The woman in Zhejiang is known as @jiawensishi – and also “rat person”. I am not being rude; that’s what she calls herself. There are lots of rat people out there: it’s a whole trend in China. You might have heard of the “lying flat” movement a few years ago, when young people lazed around displaying symptoms of mild depression, and some thinkers, including the novelist Liao Zenghu, theorised that it was a passive-aggressive resistance movement, rebelling against the demands of materialism and capitalism. Well, “rat people” are a rodenty reboot." I thought it appropriate here, Mark Cuoccio
Such an incredibly powerful metaphor. I think the following quote will stick with me for a long time.
“But my interest here is not in this form of forgetting, but in the way that we enter an existential state of forgetfulness when we are immersed in our digital Lethe, in how long we allow ourselves to abide in this state, and in the effect over the course of a lifetime of such indiscriminate immersion.”
"Maybe we just need to practice the discipline of refusing to drink from the waters of the digital stream in the first place."
Is it discipline to decline to drink poison once you have identified it as such?
"Mixing metaphors, it is also true that some drink precisely that they might forget. The digital stream as well as the bottle can be a form of escapism, self-prescribe anesthetics against the pains of life. "
I think this is a far more likely scenario, and far more widespread than the above might suggest. The wish to escape is not always a conscious one, but is no less powerful for being subconscious. Since your footnote suggests a pop music reference ("some dance/drink to remember...some dance/drink to forget), I'll suggest another from the same basic time period that explains the concepts of lethe, lethargy, and the motivation for doom scrolling far better than I ever could, and in far fewer words:
Socrates (or Plato, or Plato's version of Socrates — it's not always clear) had a conception of knowledge that can seem alien to our modern conception.
For him, knowledge is only of the most important things; it's therefore rare and difficult to achieve. But once achieved, it overwhelms the soul. Hence the notorious Socratic idea that there's no such thing as knowing the good but failing to pursue it.
Having overwhelmed the soul, knowledge is unshakeable by wayward passions or by rationalizations. But it is unshakeable by reasoning too: something purporting to be evidence refuting genuine knowledge can only be something play-acting as evidence.
There seems to be only one thing that can weaken knowledge's hold on the soul: forgetting. Which is why remembering is the only thing that can restore knowledge. And, crucially, one cannot remember on one's own.
I mean this meditation simply as a contribution to your point.
Well, Plato lived in a time (in Athens) that assumed an unchanging world with unchangeable values. His thoughts have been extensively critiqued for that blindness. He preceded the fall of Athens and the total revision of Athenian beliefs in their supremacy and continued existence. We, now, know better. Beliefs, thoughts, memories, and our realities are destroyed and re-truthed daily, momentarily.
If you think we now know better, you're proceeding under an assumption of intellectual progress that I don't share. And that assumption implicates another one, about the value of studying the history of ideas, that I don't share, either. So I'm afraid I'll have to let your comment lie. But I thank you for your thoughts about the historical context, which it is always worth keeping in mind.
"...words are repositories of cultural memory'. If anyone has this reference, I would like to know a source, or any discussion of it, although it is a common truth, though often awkwardly interpreted.
Edward Sapir, the great linguist, once wrote- I don't have a direct reference- that the languages we speak are the inheritance of generations. We learn our languages from our ancestors, and the wisdom that they contain, and in all the manifestations of their complex linguistic structures. We see this most clearly in oral traditions, those cultures without writing systems. Strikingly for us, for instance, in the Australian Songlines, or the stick maps of the Marshal Islands or in the great oral maps of the Athabaskan peoples, which allowed them to orient themselves and travel over huge distances in harsh environments by speaking or 'singing', and also provide contact with their histories and moral codes. It is not surprising to me to find that many peoples and cultures consider language, words, sacred.
I don't believe we've lost this, my version of denying despair. It's just buried under a thick layer of muck.
Thanks for your timely thoughts. Even in our old bookish world we needed convivial friends as well as libraries, even when we stacked up notes by pen and paper. Commendably, Veronika Bond shares a convivial substack and writing project, apparently following Barfield and his source into etymology, using her advantage as a native speaker of German conversant with translation. https://veronikabondsymbiopaedia.substack.com
Yesterday a small conversation developed around her topic of 'self'. I guess the world of friends needs the poetics of images as well as words, and Mnemosyne as well as the different kinds of forgetting,
In a few months I will cross the border into what somewhat bureaucratically is defined these days as 'old - old'. The matter of forgetting as well as 'monuments of unageing intellect' has me keeping company with poets where I can, not forgetting Dante and his guide. Thanks.
PS Sadly your description of a culture dominating a civilisation is reminiscent of early dementias, a plural word to add to a predicament. Perhaps a metaphor as well as a condition; I imagine a GPS recursively failing to update an increasingly complex reality.
I love this. Another lens I find useful for examining digital forgetfulness is bound up with the word "flow" itself and the temporary suspension of self-consciousness associated with that state. Gamblers seek the "zone" of technologized numbness because, perhaps, it's a way of slipping outside of time and angst and memory. Or, perhaps, these are rationalizations of a biochemical loop they're snared in.
Pathologically avoiding actuality does much harm. But even doom-scrolling can be, in its way, adaptive: a refuge or respite from overload; a semi-attending method for sampling the algorithmic totality. I worry, though, that it breeds dependence and denial; that we forget how to be fully present to ourselves. We know there is a world beyond the cave's shadows, but cannot conceive of coping with it.
Regarding your footnote on the etymology of "remember" -- there's a beautiful poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves," which draws on this idea:
"For earth ' her being has unbound, her dapple is at an end, as- / tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; ' self ín self steepèd and páshed – quite / Disremembering, dísmémbering, ' áll now."
Here’s an example of the Image of Things - a friend of mine was buying a couch. The purpose of the couch was for sitting and hosting friends and family, including her little nephew who she loves dearly. Unfortunately the image of things got in the way of the purpose of things and she bought a beautiful white couch. Now she is under stress whenever her nephew visits and can’t fully be present in the moment with him, for fear of this white couch getting stained. Again I think of Christopher Alexander and his meditations on “the quality without a name.” If things are to be truly alive they must evoke the experiences they are intended to evoke: they have to be about function and purpose, not image. We have to fight to remember this now.
I often wonder if screen time is inherently lethargic (unmemorable) in that our memories of using screens collapse into vague super-memories. All the time spent reading the news in bed becomes one blurry experience. All the time spent watching videos. I have an easier time recalling reading a physical book at a specific time and place than I do any individual Kindle session.
I love your writing. I was sharing a thought recently, that the biggest threat of our time is to come to mistake this digital world of illusions for the real world, and to forget which is which. The Image of Things is eating us alive. I often imagine a secret little population of resisters awake in a sea of people who have been lulled to sleep in this stream of constant distraction. Let's keep our eyes open, facing the land of the living.
Are you thinking of Emerson's claim that "language is fossil poetry"?
An excerpt from a piece in The Guardian, April 29,2025 that speaks to this essay's points: "The woman in Zhejiang is known as @jiawensishi – and also “rat person”. I am not being rude; that’s what she calls herself. There are lots of rat people out there: it’s a whole trend in China. You might have heard of the “lying flat” movement a few years ago, when young people lazed around displaying symptoms of mild depression, and some thinkers, including the novelist Liao Zenghu, theorised that it was a passive-aggressive resistance movement, rebelling against the demands of materialism and capitalism. Well, “rat people” are a rodenty reboot." I thought it appropriate here, Mark Cuoccio
Such an incredibly powerful metaphor. I think the following quote will stick with me for a long time.
“But my interest here is not in this form of forgetting, but in the way that we enter an existential state of forgetfulness when we are immersed in our digital Lethe, in how long we allow ourselves to abide in this state, and in the effect over the course of a lifetime of such indiscriminate immersion.”
"Maybe we just need to practice the discipline of refusing to drink from the waters of the digital stream in the first place."
Is it discipline to decline to drink poison once you have identified it as such?
"Mixing metaphors, it is also true that some drink precisely that they might forget. The digital stream as well as the bottle can be a form of escapism, self-prescribe anesthetics against the pains of life. "
I think this is a far more likely scenario, and far more widespread than the above might suggest. The wish to escape is not always a conscious one, but is no less powerful for being subconscious. Since your footnote suggests a pop music reference ("some dance/drink to remember...some dance/drink to forget), I'll suggest another from the same basic time period that explains the concepts of lethe, lethargy, and the motivation for doom scrolling far better than I ever could, and in far fewer words:
"Any world that I'm welcome to
Is better
Than the one
I come from"
Socrates (or Plato, or Plato's version of Socrates — it's not always clear) had a conception of knowledge that can seem alien to our modern conception.
For him, knowledge is only of the most important things; it's therefore rare and difficult to achieve. But once achieved, it overwhelms the soul. Hence the notorious Socratic idea that there's no such thing as knowing the good but failing to pursue it.
Having overwhelmed the soul, knowledge is unshakeable by wayward passions or by rationalizations. But it is unshakeable by reasoning too: something purporting to be evidence refuting genuine knowledge can only be something play-acting as evidence.
There seems to be only one thing that can weaken knowledge's hold on the soul: forgetting. Which is why remembering is the only thing that can restore knowledge. And, crucially, one cannot remember on one's own.
I mean this meditation simply as a contribution to your point.
Well, Plato lived in a time (in Athens) that assumed an unchanging world with unchangeable values. His thoughts have been extensively critiqued for that blindness. He preceded the fall of Athens and the total revision of Athenian beliefs in their supremacy and continued existence. We, now, know better. Beliefs, thoughts, memories, and our realities are destroyed and re-truthed daily, momentarily.
If you think we now know better, you're proceeding under an assumption of intellectual progress that I don't share. And that assumption implicates another one, about the value of studying the history of ideas, that I don't share, either. So I'm afraid I'll have to let your comment lie. But I thank you for your thoughts about the historical context, which it is always worth keeping in mind.
"...words are repositories of cultural memory'. If anyone has this reference, I would like to know a source, or any discussion of it, although it is a common truth, though often awkwardly interpreted.
Edward Sapir, the great linguist, once wrote- I don't have a direct reference- that the languages we speak are the inheritance of generations. We learn our languages from our ancestors, and the wisdom that they contain, and in all the manifestations of their complex linguistic structures. We see this most clearly in oral traditions, those cultures without writing systems. Strikingly for us, for instance, in the Australian Songlines, or the stick maps of the Marshal Islands or in the great oral maps of the Athabaskan peoples, which allowed them to orient themselves and travel over huge distances in harsh environments by speaking or 'singing', and also provide contact with their histories and moral codes. It is not surprising to me to find that many peoples and cultures consider language, words, sacred.
I don't believe we've lost this, my version of denying despair. It's just buried under a thick layer of muck.
Thanks for your timely thoughts. Even in our old bookish world we needed convivial friends as well as libraries, even when we stacked up notes by pen and paper. Commendably, Veronika Bond shares a convivial substack and writing project, apparently following Barfield and his source into etymology, using her advantage as a native speaker of German conversant with translation. https://veronikabondsymbiopaedia.substack.com
Yesterday a small conversation developed around her topic of 'self'. I guess the world of friends needs the poetics of images as well as words, and Mnemosyne as well as the different kinds of forgetting,
In a few months I will cross the border into what somewhat bureaucratically is defined these days as 'old - old'. The matter of forgetting as well as 'monuments of unageing intellect' has me keeping company with poets where I can, not forgetting Dante and his guide. Thanks.
PS Sadly your description of a culture dominating a civilisation is reminiscent of early dementias, a plural word to add to a predicament. Perhaps a metaphor as well as a condition; I imagine a GPS recursively failing to update an increasingly complex reality.