To run out of memory, in the language of computing, is to have too much of it and also not enough. Such is our current situation: we once again find ourselves in a crisis of memory, this time marked not by dearth but by surplus. Simply put, we are running out of space. There is no longer enough room to store all of our data, our terabytes of history, our ever-accumulating archival detritus. As I type, my computer labors to log and compress my words, to convert each letter into a byte, each byte into a hexadecimal “memory address.” This procedure is called “memory allocation,” a process of sifting, sorting, and erasing without which our devices would cease to function. For new bytes to be remembered, older ones must be “freed” — which is to say, emptied but not destroyed — so as to prevent what are called “memory leaks.” Leaks are to be avoided because, wherever they occur, blocks of precious computing memory are forever fated to remember the same stubborn information, and therefore rendered useless. For memory allocation to function smoothly, the start and finish of each memory block must be definitively marked. “In order to free memory, we need to keep better track of memory,” one developer advises. Operating systems, unlike the humans for whom they were designed, are built to tolerate little ambiguity about where memory begins and where it ought to end. The machinic lexicon is both a site of and a guide to the current memory crisis. We are living through the tail-end of the “memory boom,” immersed in the memory-soaked culture that it coaxed into being, a culture now saturated with information, helplessly consumed by the unrelenting labor of data retrieval, recovery, and storage. Even the computers are confused, for deletion does not mean what it used to: when profiles, usernames, or files are erased they are often replaced by what are called “ghost” or “tombstone” versions of their former selves, and these empty markers of bygone selves haunt and clutter our hard drives. Fifty years ago, memory became a “best-seller in consumer society,” as the great historian Jacques Le Goff lamented. The new prestige of memory, its special authority for us, was evident before the digital era, in culture and history and politics; but today, with the colossus of digital memory added, I suspect that we are watching as memory’s hulking mass begins to collapse under its own weight. It is a physical crisis as well as a philosophical one: the overdue reckoning with corrosive memorials — with the contemporary ideal and imperative of memorialization — has not been answered with a reappraisal of what memorials are for and what they can do, but rather with a rapid profusion of new ones. We all belong to the contemporary “cult of apology,” in the words of the architect and scholar Valentina Rozas-Krause, who has observed that we have come perilously close to relying upon the built environment to speak on our behalf, to atone for our sins, to signal our moral transformation. Of course the cult of apology disfigures also our personal and social and political relations. “The more we commemorate what we did, the more we transform ourselves into people who did not do it,” warns the novelist and historian Eelco Runia. A superabundance of bad memories has been answered only with more memory. Our spatial coordinates are no longer primarily defined by our relation to physical memorials, municipal boundaries, and national borders, but ultimately by our proximity to data centers and “latency zones,” geographical regions with sufficient power and water to keep us connected to the cloud, to track our live locations and feed our phones directions. (The cloud may be the controlling symbol of our time.) In the United States, the Commonwealth of Virginia is the site of the largest concentration of data centers: these bastions of memory are being built over Civil War battlefields, gravesites, and coal mines, next to schools and suburban cul-de-sacs, beside reservoirs and state parks. In Singapore, the proliferation of data centers led the government to impose a three-year moratorium on further construction. (The ban was imposed in 2019 and lifted in 2022; new data centers are subject to stricter sustainability rules.) In Ireland, which together with the Netherlands stores most of the European continent’s data, similar measures are under consideration. Augustine described memory as a “spreading limitless room,” an undefined space to which memories, things, people, and events are consigned for the sake of preservation, and we have made his theoretical fantasy all too real. These unforgetting archives suck up the water, energy, air, and silence; their server fields buzz, warm, and whir through the night. It is an unsustainable and ugly situation to which a bewildering solution has already been found: by 2030, virtual data will be stored in strands of synthetic DNA. How did we get here? We are swimming in memory — sinking in it, really — devotees of what has become a secular religion of remembrance, consumed by the unyielding labor of excavating, archiving, recording, memorializing, prosecuting, processing, and reckoning with conflicting memories. We cannot keep going in this manner, for it is ecologically, politically, and morally unsustainable. There is no need to deploy metaphors here, for we are quite literally smothering the earth under the weight of all our memory. What happened is that we forgot how to forget. Along the way, we also forgot why we remember — the invention of one-click data recovery, searchable histories, and all-knowing archives made our already accelerating powers of recollection reflexive, automatic, unthinking, foolproof. I am belaboring these contemporary technological mechanisms of recall because not only have they ensured that remembering has become the default setting of everyday life, but they have also tricked us into believing we can lay claim to a certain kind of forensic knowledge of the past — an illusion of perfect completeness and clarity. It is a dangerous posture, for it is
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence