inkbluesky

The advantages of amnesia - From the Internet to the iPod, technology is bringing rapid advances in memory. What society needs now are new ways to forget.

As digital-storage capacities reach seemingly boundless proportions, however, some thinkers are becoming nervous about the unintended consequences of memory technology. Certainly Google’s enormous reserves of user information, stored in dozens of secretive data centers across the world, and the literally photographic memory of the Internet Archive, which preserves billions of defunct Web pages for posterity, are enough to leave anyone rattled. New forms of memory are permanent and accessible from anywhere. As their reach grows, scholars are asking if now - perhaps for the first time in human history - we need to find ways to forget.

“We used to have a system in which we forgot things easily and had to invest energy in remembering,” says Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “Now we’re switching to a system in which we remember everything and have to invest energy in order to forget. That’s an enormous transformation.”

Jorge Luis Borges envisioned the risks of perfect memory in his famous story “Funes the Memorious,” about a man gifted with unlimited recall, and paralyzed by it.

Didn’t the movie the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind basically tell us that even bad memories have value. Maybe its a little of both. If I obsessed about my sad memories I probably would become an emotional potato. At the same time if I erased them I would lose some hard earned wisdom.

snarled old tree. 

Lives Wasted In An Impossible War - by Jim Sinclair & Rick Bender

We have sacrificed our sisters and brothers in wars that have no victories, and rather than bring freedom to these countries, they have brought violence, death and insecurity. If the death tolls of the invading countries are high, the toll in Iraq is truly staggering. While official numbers top 65,000 Iraqi deaths, unofficial numbers put the carnage at more than 500,000 lives.

As the death toll climbs, so does the economic cost. Public money and resources (working people’s taxes) support this war. The amounts are staggering. We watch as living standards continue to decline on both sides of the border. Poverty grows, and along with it so does the homeless crisis in all our cities. Every week the United States spends $8 billion more on war. To date the war has consumed more than $450 billion; in Canada the number has climbed to more than $5 billion. Swedish experts report that in 2006 the world expenditures on arms reached more than $1.2 trillion, enough to feed, clothe, house and provide basic education and medical care for the planet’s poor.

But wait a minute if we don’t fight all the Muslims over there they’ll attack us over here. An old bit of Indian wisdom: If the world’s Muslims decide to attack you’ll have plenty of warning. The earth tends to tremble when a billion people all charge at once.