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Defragmenting the metaphysical presence of technology — Part I
Reflections on Fragments of an Infinite Memory: My Life with the Internet by Maël Renouard
Maël Renouard begins his book with an intriguing first chapter that ends on a sentence holding the door open for our curiosity:
“The internet shows that recollection has charted the path of technology — infinite distancing and preservation — and melancholy is the future of emotion.”
Renouard is a French philosophy professor who originally published The Fragments of an Infinite Memory in 2016, while I was conducting a year-long social experiment in Paris. The findings of my experiment resulted in a firm personal resolve to pay more attention not only to WHO is speaking and WHY (over just what is being said) but also WHEN their thoughts were articulated, what was happening around them at that time; and if I was alive, what I was doing and thinking then. It is a method attempting to contextualize external information (essential thoughts of others in transferrable formats) within the consciousness of history and my own experience to avoid deception by eloquent rhetoric of clever sophists. It is also incidentally, an approach similar to stance detection, a deep learning technique for AI used to uncover author bias and fake news.
The form and intention of the content creator triangulated with my own (and their) personal experience, as well as the events surrounding the creative activities, has become more significant than ever to me. Silicon circuits can already produce algorithmic mashups capable of fooling even the most astute human observers of culture. Artificial intelligence is quietly stirring artificial flavours into the long dark tea-time of the soul. Wink, wink…
“The world of literature itself turns out to be a small world, a world of winks between old friends,” as Renouard puts it. And if Proust is right that “through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe,” then how could we ever forgive ourselves for becoming enchanted with eyewitness…
