Digital memory’s fixity makes digitalized life temporally dead
Evidence
In other words, the past – as something that remains self-identical and is always to be retrieved in the same form – does not exist. Digital memory consists of indifferent – as it were, undead – points of presence. It lacks the extended horizon constituting the temporality of the living. This means that digitalized life lacks animacy. Digital temporality belongs to the undead. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 157
Categorization
- STORYSTEM: The idea of digitalized life as ‘undead’ temporality — lives stored but not lived — could seed a speculative story about archived selves.
- FICTION: A character whose memory is fully archived but narratively inert, drifting in ‘undead’ temporality, is a workable premise.
- XREF: connects to: Digital memory lacks the living, retranscribed temporality of real memory; Digital storage differs in kind from human narrative memory — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 154; Digital memory is additive whereas human memory is inherently narrative (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- Digital memory lacks the living, retranscribed temporality of real memory
#corroborates(0.95) - Digital memory is additive whereas human memory is inherently narrative
#expands(0.85) - Digital storage differs in kind from human narrative memory
#corroborates(0.82) — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 154 - Computers fail at the rich texture of ordinary lived experience
#corroborates(0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1023 - Digitalization reduces the sensory continuum to standardized discrete units manipulable by logic
#expands(0.78) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 208 - Digital-native generations experience time as disconnected micro-slices
#expands(0.75) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 53