Politics of erasure from damnatio memoriae

to alluring void

In contemporary world the amount of data is grow-ing extensively, yet it cannot be interpreted sepa-rately from human organisms . The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how a large number of present-day practices including real-time backup of memory, living in digital clouds, and alifelog done by storing memories-like information are all eras-ing the notions of an existing individual as well as collective memory .

Prominent critics of modern culture such as Jean-Franois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Ber-nard Stiegler posited that information stored in a digital format is not only an external database but also an internal memory of a human . Their philosophical assumptions are continued in an af-firmative fashion nowadays, lacking acritical per-spective similar to the antique search for aproper medium to store our cultural memory . Hopefully, the following article extends beyond the scope of that classical dispute and provides a coherent ex-planation for the means in which contemporary media practices are training people to erase their memory . In other words, this text embarks on aroad to find ways media are conditioning human beings to replace their memories gathered in the material world with digital memories programmed by technical media, erasing existing memories in the process .

We would therefore like to propose so-called weak version of mind uploading concerning the process of uploading the human memory . Owing to the Teilhard de Chardins metaphor of the ome-ga point we can expound that the replacement of memory is correlated with ashift from ahumanis-tic view on memory to atranshumanistic concept of memory . The important paradox which should not be omitted is the ability of people to recall the ob-jects, people and feelings they have not experienced, meaning memories not created through apresence in agiven situation but by acquiring memory from digital databases . Therefore, we shall state that the omega point to which these tendencies are emerg-ing is mind uploading apractice of programming the whole human mind into amachine thereby al-lowing for existance as pure data, without the bur-den of abody . Obviously, in the recent state of tech-no-scientifict development, there is no evidence for the possibilty of asimilar practice, nevertheless, it functions not as amere technoutopian fantasy, but agoal for the people to aspire to .

The next aspect to consider touches upon the fact that the memory in a digital format is not a property of an individual organism or even the whole multigenerational culture but is stored as ex-ternal data . As aconsequence people are freed from their obligations to acquire memory, as it is always

rafa ilnicki adam mickiewicz university, Pozna

digital lethe of transhumanism: weak mind uploading as erasure of individual and collective memory

266 Rafa Ilnicki

present in adigital format and may be programmed into either individual or collective memory .

Let us examine this issue from two slightly op-posing perspectives . Firstly, humanism always pro-posed a finite model of a human who is subordi-nated to cultural practices it is more focused on the past, acrucial determinant in the future of the human development . Transhumanism on the other hand, is directed toward the future by discarding essential understanding of human and shifting towards an infinite technological development of our race . So for the humanism it is indispensable to realize the model of being (be it educational, reli-gious, scientific or other) with regard to the past by seeking continuity between amodel and its modifi-cation . The aforementioned model of being aciti-zen, ahusband, aprophet etc . is symbolic people gather their memories from their environment and subsequently create them in the ecology of their presence . In the transhumanistic perspective, the memory can no longer be limited by current ter-ritory but must be freed from the constraints of symbolic cultures . Furthermore, the future ceases to be directed by symbols and is directed by tech-nology instead .

We shall refer to the change discussed above as the weak form of mind uploading . Alas, it is not weak in its erasure function, but in the scale of mind uploading . We are not yet able to achieve the strong form of mind uploading, the one described by transhumanistic visioneries . In the modern era, due to popular interfaces that offer people unlim-ited territorial possibilities of acquiring memory, they do not remember basic facts from their lives . The interfaces from hardware gadgets to software social media platforms allow for technological creation and mediation . Even the symbolic memo-ry is mediated by technological devices . Moreover, such interfaces enable searching the global data-bases in real time, without any delay or necessity for in-depth reading . This type of connection to individual and collective memory was never before available to culture in its symbolic and material de-velopment .

All in all, the most paramount factor here is the speed . We must remember that literature and other symbolic media were "slow media" what they pre-sented was a linear order of events which did not extend the imagination of areader of culture who in turn acquired memories stored in symbolic artifacts and then compared them to his own memory . Writ-

ing as such was even the main concern of Plato, yet it was avery slow way to inhibit memory every memorial trace must be written and then acquired by reading . The mere storage of digital memories enables effects that were never present to symbolic cultures, namely tagging, searching, instant sharing and more . For this reason, the discussed cultural change falls into the scope of transhumanism .

Contemporary practices of people being con-stantly logged into virtual spheres of technical me-dia forc them to erase the premises and fundaments of their memory . Although living in their bodies, people have memories which were not created by the senses or the speed of their bodies . No memory exists which was not digitalized . Being on social media sites, twitting, blogging, posting photos and files, storing every experience in some kind of adig-ital format is making memory public and accessible for any human being . Protected as it may seem, this memory can leak or, worse still, be deleted . Human existence is thus shaped by erasure of individual and collective memory by interfaces as well as function-ing in parallel digital memory worlds . This is the transhumanistic condition of our memory .

Human memory is constantly being extended beyond its natural capacity to store information . The speed of growth of these practices is not asym-bolic one, but atechnological one . Firstly, we ob-serve the shift from an analog (symbolic) form to adigital (technical) format . Secondly, we can per-ceive how the memory is shared collectively and edited in real time . The main consequence of these changes is that any member of culture must free his memory up", that is, erase his memory, albeit the collective memory appears intact . That digital stream of forgetting an analogy to river Lethe is not some abstract, mythological tale anymore, it is aset of interfaces which constantly are erasing and delivering new memories .

The transhumanisms order of digital Lethe created by electronic tools for personal and col-lective memory erasure, so that everyone could ac-quire new, external memories, leads to abolition of any stable memory, in turn extending operational memory acquired from digital databases . Gilbert Simondon writes that this technological mediation of memory threatens symbolic order, the order of individuation . To briefly reiterate the meaning: in-dividuation is aprocess in which an individual gains uniqueness which is the basis of his identity and cultural reference to other subjects later on . When

267Digital Lethe of transhumanism: weak mind uploading as erasure of individual...

destroyed by technological mediation of memory it becomes disindividuation, as stated by Bernard Stiegler . However, the symbolic order is neither destroyed nor being put on hiatus, it is rather tech-nologically structured by interfaces of popular use (social media, communication media) that enforce disindividuation . Simultaneously, they enforce anew way of erasing existing memories, so that we end in an endless loop of rhytmical shifts from indi-viduation to disindividuation and vice versa .

Biometric passports, implants, nanomedicine technological modification and extension of hu-man perception are implementing new forms of memory as well . This brings about pragmatic consequences for the current developments of bio-technology, nanotechnology and robotics . They all create both biological and material memories . A human is not being changed merely by the digi-tal memories in popular interfaces, but by material extensions of body as well . The human race is being increasingly and diversely dependent on technol-ogy and its development . We can also observe how on both individual and global scale the policy of erasure is being replaced by technologies of erasure .

Let us shift our focus to consequences of replac-ing cultural mechanism of forgetting with popular interfaces . Flusser reminds us that forgetting is dying, to forget everything is to die1 it is then safe to assume, after putting an equality sign be-tween forgetting and erasing of the digital era, that erasing memories is difficult because of existential consequences . People do not see themselves as simi-lar to their present selves since in trying to remem-ber what they did at different points of their lives they perceive themselves as very disconnected and dispersed . Everything that is remembered upon is changed, ourselves included . When forcing oneself to recall amemory, one arrives at aproblem of de-fining the subject of remembrance . Therefore, the principle of identity the foundation of Western culture is rejected by technics and transhuman-ists . This also triggers labelling a memory as a ghost as every memory is dispersed and distant, remembering undergoes metamorphosis into an art of chasing ghosts . These ghosts however, are more real than any natural memory that is saved in an analog format .

The life of atranshuman is backed up in what we shall call metamemories, backups of memory

1 Flusser (2011: 104, 110, 147, 148) .

traces optionally publicized on portals or social me-dia . We can already easily measure, record and store the data from all human senses i .e . heartbeat, sugar or hormones levels, and even brainwaves . Portable music players and watches, in accordance with the Quantified self movement, measure the number of steps and calories burnt . It is only the question of time, when music social sites will be algorithmical-ly oriented towards number of kilometers walked while listening to music, as the route can now be traced by mapping software (GPS) . The whole hu-man life is being digitalized, quantified and formal-ized . That gave the society areign over an individ-ual, not only his or her mentality, but his internal, biological integrity as well . Nowadays, doctors can see inside someones organs while close-knit friends can locate each other through leaving digital traces . This is anew way of living which accounts for see-ing all aspects of life in their technological magni-tude, in the way Baudrillard wrote about endocul-ture operationalized and most intimate thoughts are stored in a digital form . The certainty of re-membrance is decayed to ametalevel at which the subject thinks he can remember anything whenever he wants . This potentiality of remembrance consti-tutes anew form of certainty .

The aforementioned certainty is not based on the stable existence of its perceiver but rather on the feeling that everything can be instantly brought back to memory . That infers achange in meaning of Platos argument of how people do not retain memory due to the contact with acertain medium . It is not the medium which is to blame, it is the manner in which life is organized by publicly shar-ing the memories simulatanous to selling thereof .

So remembering and recording are nearly op-posite yet belonging to the same river of digital Lethe . A problem with Lethe soon arises in atran-shumans life one is directed toward forgetting, that is erasing their memories, and simultanously one records everything of concern, alas there is no time to see the recorded content . Storage and backing up becomes a transhumanistic ritual it constitutes a metalevel that is a database of digi-tal traces handled by gadgets such as cell phones, smartphones, personal computers, pendrives, mp3 players, and tablets which are nothing more than apersonal interactive memory suspensions devices . We shall return to this point later in the text .

For now probably the only imperative for re-membering is the market people want to remem-

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ber their products, services and new possibilities . Every new possibility is being rapidly replaced by a new one, so there is neither space nor use for memory stored in asymbolic way . That tendency, if continued, means that the memory will be gov-erned by the market in the future people shall not be the owners of their own memory (or memories) because aplethora of recording software and hard-ware will be the property of various corporations . Through modern day commercial practices we can already observe the act of seizing the collective memory . Referring to Michael Sandels example: some corporations are buying advertising space in-cluding not only places commonly thought to be commercially available (such as billboards, outdoor screens, newspapers etc .), but also the names of bus or train stations .2 Changing the name of astation is more than just acommercial operation, it is also technical . Moreover, looking from the perspective of descendants of an individual astation was named after, they will witness their symbolic and material heritage being erased . As they are most often not in a financial or legal control of the station, they shall have no control nor gain in the governments transaction . The traces of their existence is gone . The other aspect of the proces is chaos within the community as companies do not last forever and every new name of the station means people will be less likely to remember it . A station may have a different label on every map, this in turn leads to a conclusion that every map should be actual-ized not only according to political, cultural or social changes, but also after certain transactions between an investor and the city; this is akind of city marketing3 . In this case, technology seems to be just an instrument of change in reality it makes the change possible and is the policy of erasing the memory itself . The next stage, we suppose, may be changing the history for marketing purposes . The winners who write history will then emerge not through the recognition of their outstanding deeds but be chosen according to the amount of memory they will be able to purchase .

For more examples we might turn to theat-ers . In amovie titled Ghosts With Shit Jobs4 agirl earns money by mentioning given brands in con-

2 Sandel (2012: 238) .3 Sandel (2012: 246) .4 Directed by Chris McCawley, Jim Morrison, Jim Mun-

roe, Tate Young, Canada 2012, 94 min .

versations . For every spoken and heard brandname she receives profit the counter is working in real time . Of course, her disputants are not aware of her profession . Nowadays, people sell their free time for answering pointless polls or their skin for advertising space . The movie reveals the future of such atendency aperson becomes an exportable and replacable being because erasing his memory and culture causes a loss of his identity, causes him to be no-one . Culture means transmission of memory, as says Regis Debray, and here we are left with a transmissions of brands . Furthermore, Paul Virillo states: "We can hardly be surprised, after that, at the recent neocolonial conquest of this of a virtual space that replaces the real space of the other five ( . . .)5. () A revolution in instantaneous information that is overturning the chronotope of our daily lives to the unseen advantage, it would seem, of achronotype of accelerating historic time in which the instant dominates all duration from now on . This explains the characteristic assault on memory and memory activism which is in the end nothing less than the triggering economic and political of the first War of Time for aworld in the grip of its own ac-celerated spatiotemporal finalization . 6 ( . . .) Being metastable, open systems always renew themselves . The closed system, on the other hand, collapses on itself and implodes . This is what is happening today with the world economy ."7

Our memory is being held hostage to world economy of digitalized memory . In the constant ac-celeration of life, the problem is not how to remem-ber but how to forget .The human life gets directed toward Lethe not Mnemosyne hence ahuman be-ing exists in avirtual state of sudden removal .

Contemporary citizens are the citizens of memo-ry-cities conjugated with Augmented Reality . "Past, present and future contract the omnipresent instant, just as the expanse of the terrestrial globe dies these days in the excessive speed of the constant accel-eration of our travels and our telecommunication ."8 The component of travel becomes crucial and in it, the necessity of memory erasure: people travel between avariety of memory data banks and gain memories they consider their own . Nowadays, trav-

5 Virilio (2010: 77) .6 Virilio (2010: 92)7 Virilio (2010: 97)8 Virilio (2010: 71)

269Digital Lethe of transhumanism: weak mind uploading as erasure of individual...

elling equals forgetting foo the reason that technol-ogy offers embarking on atrip without leaving ones place nor any individual effort . Let us elaborate for amoment by reflecting upon an example of acom-puter game user . When aplayer is starting agame he exports all of his or her memory and replaces it with the data . In order to gain so-called suspention of belief the user technically forgets himself for the time of play and regains his old, symbolic memory afterwards, yet it is now starting to merge with new, technical memories acquired in the virtual worlds while playing the game . In aschizophrenic sense, he has double or multiple standards for remembering oneself in different planes, as he suspends his "of-fline self " to regain the self of avirtual timeline and then merges it back to the offline memory which awaits him . That is probably the main reason why people act differently in virtual spaces, be it agame world or an interface psychological factors are strongly determined by technological ones (this is the central thesis for Sherry Turkles research con-ducted over the years) . Generally, once an interface is opened the old memory is erased from the cur-rent moment in time and stored just to be uploaded to the user again with his old identity at the end of the process . Nevertheless, aghostly continuum exists in-between .

The series of exporting-erasure and importing-uploading is embedded in an interference where the information shapeshifts into ghosts in the sense Derrida defined them: products of technical media . Computer games are haunting their users whenever they are disconnected . On the other hand, people are not haunted by their offline memory in the computer game . The user is not fully present in neither of those realities, or just "unpresent"9, to use a term coined by Wojciech Chya . Worse yet, humans try to exorcise the ghosts of information by technological exorcism done on memory .

Progress form railroad to interactive technolo-gies causes degeneration of land in the favor of sky10 . This is concluded by Virilio with a strong diagnosis concerning the loss of the memory en-forced by technics: "So the anachronistic accel-eration of present reality does not spell the end of historicity . More importantly, it does spell the

9 It is the opposite to metaphysics of presence (Derrida term) where being is fully conscious and active .

10 There are placed Virilio words in quotes: Virilio (2010: 70) .

emergence of lying, not by omission any more, but by deterrence of the future as well as of the past . This involves sudden loss of memory, every bit as much as of imagination, about the future of atoo-cramped telluric planet, cluttered and rendered insalubrious not so much by rubbish these days as by the illusions it entertains, its great progressive illusions ."11

The sudden loss of memory and imagination al-ludes here to people with erased memories left only with the imagination of new memories . Striking similarities across peoples imaginations stem from them being derived from the same data (so there is no reason to divide between modes of temporal-ity) . Problem which prevails is not that the human race will be terminated by technology, but that it becomes removable due to preference of their ef-ficiency over their symbolic culture .

A human being needs its territory, without it he is an unpresent being who becomes an exported being . The aforementioned weak mind uploading is realized instantaneously i .e . when one forgets about his material and symbolic environment while watching TV, playing agame or listening to music these are all examples of an everyday weak version of mind uploading . So to be transhuman, one does not need to be surgically implanted or connected to powerful machines able to upload his or her mind to the datasphere, in the current stage of develop-ment, owing to wireless technologies, one could even be called am exported being metabeing . The two dominant parts of life play and work (a symbol of aserious, adult life) are strengthened so these areas do not intersect . We can notice agreat instance of such division in the film Play hard, work hard.12 Yet, never should we forget that simu-lanously they are gaining proximity to each other in fields like edutainment or gamification .

Is memory divided into separate parts in a life of atranshuman? We think so, that is the only way to establish efficiency . Please consider the follow-ing paragraph carefully as the whole culture now shifts from exteriorization (Andr Leroi Gourhan, Bernard Stiegler) to exportability (Paul Virilio) and in the scope of that change movement be-comes replaced by transfer . A being is exported between the fields of work and play thereby being converted and changed through constant cycle of

11 Virilio (2010: 7071) .12 Directed by Carmen Losmann, Leipzig 2011 .

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downloading-uploading the memory . "Here we are, then, way beyond the old wars of memory and the collective civic duty that went with them, for we have reached the threshold of the great chrono-logical deterrence and its particularly pathologi-cal chronicles . . . attracted, it would seem, by asort of atemporal dromological amnesia which will be never anything more than an alternative version of aterrorist balance the balance of the computer-ized terror of cybernetic instantaneity that will take over from last centurys balance of atomic terror .13

To contextualize the above passage from Virillo (2011), dromology from "atemporal dromological amnesia" refers to his idea on how the science of future is based purely on speed, not on any form of stable knowledge . "Atemporal" means "without reference to time continuum" as there is instantane-ity that blocks any kind of duration . "Amnesia", of course, stands for "forgetting" tragically, without any warning or symptoms . It is the result of the dro-mological terror of speed which governs modern life . Speed became the regulating principle of mem-ory and therefore of human identity . In this acceler-ated, technical progress there is no time to go back-wards, to think about the past, one can only erase the past to make way (or rather space) for an even more accelerated future . Hence, forgetting equals being productive: when someone has the ability to lose his or her memories the ability to work and play more efficiently is coupled with it, dimished by the constraints of being present the material environment and real, non-mediated people .

Ideology of backup assures us that there are always copies of memory preserved in the case of failure of memory suspensions systems . A mind must be uploaded, otherwise it will be deleted by acceleration of life ruled by technology . A plethora of devices and interfaces, ranging from apps like in-stagram to robust services like facebook, can help export ahuman being into astream of digital data and after a crash regain the old memory through importing it back . What the user fails to notice is the fact that this is just technologically mediated, backed-up memory last state memory, to evoke aparallel to asavepoint in agame . We consider this to be adromological amnesia because people gain memories of their past without linear presence . Maybe we should also consider how the ability to quickly download, export and erase mental data can

13 Virilio (2010: 73) .

negate the human need to learn in the traditional sense?

To conclude, the weak mind uploading can be compared to brainwashing with one major differ-ence brainwashing concerns involuntary memory erasure while one undergoes weak mind uploading willingly . Every such exchange of digital memories leads to destabilizing human identity . This is what is left from social contract users of popular inter-faces destabilize themselves as it is easier than ever to forget anything or anyone and harder to create long-term memories . Disappearance forces pleasure14 and brainwashing the minds of users of popular interfaces by media has its global pleasure effects . Memory loss feels like an orgy, not suffering . We un-derscore the conclusion from this paper: one should not consider digitalization only as contemporary phenomena as it deeply affects the future, bringing substantial change in human life and cultural struc-tures . People are currently starting to drown in the waters of the digital Lethe . Notwithstanding, by creating ideas and pondering over the transhuman-istic future of technological progress they might as well learn to swim by inventing new ways of preserv-ing the past the fabric of the future .

Bibliography

Flusser 2011 = Flusser, Vilem: Into the Universe of Tech-nical Images, trans . N .A . Roth, University of Min-nesota Press, Minneapolis 2011 .

Sandel 2012 = Michel, Sandel: Czego nie mona kupi za pienidze? Moralne granice rynku (What money cant buy: the moral limits of markets), trans . A . Chro-mik, T . Sikora, Kurhaus Publishing, Warszawa 2012 .

Virilio 2011 = Virilio, Paul: Futursim of the Instant: Stop-Eject, trans . J . Rose, Polity Press, Cambridge 2010 .

14 Virilio (2010: 76) .