Memory and lateral kinship with others are hallmarks of individuality

Evidence

Memory and horizontal alliances are two hallmarks of individuality. In Westworld, humans maintain the hosts’ docility by periodically wiping their memories, keeping them effectively trapped in the present. Indeed, the show’s drama originates when aberrant hosts become able to access memories from past lives, allowing them not only to connect the dots about how they are being used, but to recognize old kinships with other hosts that exist outside of their given narratives. We should not be surprised, then, that Walden Two prohibits members from discussing the Code with each other, or that the study of history has been dispensed with entirely. Amazingly, Frazier tells Burris that “we can make no real use of history as a current guide,” and spends an entire paragraph sneering at large academic libraries and the librarians who stock them with “trash…on the flimsy pretext that someday someone will want to study the ‘history of a field.’” Instead the library at Walden Two is small and for entertainment purposes only. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 189

Categorization

• DEFINE: Identifies memory-plus-horizontal-alliances as what constitutes individuality, which is what engineered control systems must dismantle.
• XREF: Echoes the Frankfurt School material on memory as the ground of resistance to manipulated agreement and on engineered docility.