I can’t remember to forget you
September 23rd, 2007 by WesJorge 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. Perhaps not even Borges, however, could have imagined our present capacity to accumulate and preserve memory in digital form - or the powerful impact it is already having on individual lives, as temporary indiscretions become part of the permanent record. “What you do online is potentially there forever,” says Coye Cheshire, an assistant professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. “Delete if you want; ask Google to take down that one unflattering photo - but it’s still saved, archived, somewhere.”
– Jessica Winter
See also: Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing
I can’t remember to forget you.
– Leonard Shelby in Memento