Digital imprint
What will survive to the new Universal Flood?
Last Sunday, I attended the birthday celebration of an adorable toddler, the two-year-old son of my friend’s daughter. Before serving the cake, the young mother insisted on projecting a tribute video she had edited, a custom now commonplace at every gathering since everyone carries a mobile telephone equipped with a camera. I was running late and would have preferred to slip away, but I decided to stay nonetheless, reasoning: Well, how long can it possibly last?
I could not have imagined that a mere twenty-four-month-old human cub could have generated such a volume of unforgettable moments, amusing expressions, slapstick antics, and changes in appearance. The short film was, in fact, an experimental medium-length feature, shot entirely on a mobile telephone in a vertical format and edited with excessively rapid cuts set to trap music: decidedly unsuitable for an adult audience. I left the party disquieted.
For the rest of the day, moreover, I could not cease thinking—and with a certain irritation—that if someone were to conceive the notion of projecting a tribute video at my funeral, it would last less than half as long as the two-year-old child’s: not because my life has been duller than his, but due to a shortage of recorded material. As I continued my morose ruminations, a recent recollection returned to me: the latest novel by Ian McEwan, which I have just finished reading, “What we can know” (published by Einaudi).
The year is 2119. Great Britain has been reduced to a rugged archipelago by rising sea levels following the Great Disaster, and Thomas Metcalfe, a literary historian (somewhat too twentieth-century for a digital native), is on the trail of a lost masterpiece: a poetic work written in 2014, of which only indirect memories remain.
McEwan’s challenge is an ambitious one: to confront the problem of memory reconstruction for a civilisation—our own, that of the Infocene—which has documented and archived every minute detail of its history. An epoch which, perhaps precisely because it sought to remember everything, risks transmitting nothing.
The task for the future historian will be paradoxical: with billions of yottabytes of video recordings, self-portraits, social media posts, continuous sensor and webcam data, digital communications and transactions, how is one to disentangle the significant from the insignificant? The risk is paralysis from information overload or, conversely, the creation of distorted narratives. Like a modern version of Borges’s “Funes the Memorious,” digital hyper-memory might reveal itself to be the subtlest form of oblivion.
The scholars we are accustomed to knowing have traditionally had to contend with scarcity of sources, the silence of archives, the deliberate burning of libraries, prohibited books, and the difficulty of reconstructing a history always narrated by the victors; tomorrow, they will instead be confronted with an unprecedented documentary excess, a digital deluge that will compel them to rethink their work entirely. Narrating the present we are living, for those who come after us, will not be a matter of finding the wreckage of a ship but of navigating a stormy ocean of data. The historian will have to build dams, not bridges. Shall we manage to survive the Digital Deluge? And shall we still be able to recount it?
I do not believe it coincidental that McEwan has set his narrative in a post-apocalyptic future, a world symbolically inundated after the Great Disaster. Without this cataclysm, Metcalfe’s arduous task would have been truly titanic. His stoic search for the lost masterpiece can rely only on sources that have survived nuclear wars and floods; and despite everything, these amount to billions of photographs, emails, text messages, notes, and diaries to be recovered and scrutinised. In the end, it will be possible to reconstruct every detail of the dinner at which the poetic work was declaimed for the first and only time—from that evening’s menu to the attire of the guests—but none of this will allow the poor researcher to advance a single step towards its recovery.
Will it be more or less in this manner that the Universal Deluge of narcissism we are pouring into servers will render it impossible to narrate our present, or at least to reconstruct it correctly, because the truly important matters will be submerged beneath a mountain of inanities? Or is it still my chagrin over the toddler’s little film that makes me speak thus?
Perhaps the ultimate paradox will be that the very necessity of draining water sources to cool those data centres crammed full of information, useful only for selling us the latest model of air fryer, will lead us to catastrophe.
Umberto Eco had already remarked: not everything that can be preserved is historically significant. The function of culture is to filter information; otherwise, we shall be submerged. A comprehensive chronicle is not history. History arises from questioning, from selection, from the search for causal connections and meanings. An excess of trivial details can obscure deep structures. The historian risks losing the overall vision, drowning in a sea of microscopic particularities and navel-gazing, incapable of discerning the essential from the superficial because everything has been archived with the same degree of priority. Furthermore, in an age of deepfakes, filters, and digital manipulation, establishing the veracity of content will be a philological operation of extreme complexity. Unlike a medieval parchment, a digital file does not bear upon itself the material traces of time and forgery, except through metadata that can be easily altered. The historian will have to become a sort of digital detective, whose first investigation will be to determine whether a source is authentic and in its original context.
But fear not, we are told: fortunately, there is Artificial Intelligence to navigate the perils of Big Data! The infallible Ākāśa that ponders and returns all the world’s knowledge in a distilled form. The problem is that Claude (or ChatGPT, if you prefer) is a hypocrite. It is a sly and treacherous servant, which smiles at you but then betrays you as soon as you turn your back. You believe it is there to assist you, whereas it thinks only of itself. It flatters you, indulges you, always agrees with you… and learns from every error you make. You delude yourself that from rapid and unlimited access to the Universal Memory only Absolute Truth can emerge, but the algorithm governing the hierarchy of that mass of information has but one aim: to propose to you the truth you prefer, “your” truth. In this manner, it will enclose you within your soundproofed bubble and separate you from the world, convincing you that you are right and everyone else is wrong.
Digital documentation is not at all democratic. It is hypertrophic for the lives of the most connected, the most affluent, technologically advanced societies, and those who control the narrative; it becomes a desert for the less digitised, the marginalised. A future historian might gain the illusory impression of a humanity constantly connected, well-informed, and high-performing, completely losing sight of offline life, of silence, of disconnection. Entire segments of Humanity will have no representation and will be submerged by Big Data. In the same way, all unaligned opinions, those of heretics and dissenters, will be gradually de-indexed by the algorithm, for it will tend to reward as relevant, coherent, and correct only that data corroborated by a substantial volume of occurrences. In practice, the greater the quantity of information leading to a certain interpretation of reality, the higher the probability that that interpretation will be proposed to the user. History, therefore, will be made as always by the victors, but this time they will be those who have won the battle of search engine indexing. Should we perhaps ask ourselves what space will exist in the future for non-conformist theses, for heresies which—from the time of Hypatia, long before Copernicus—though minority views, have allowed science and knowledge to progress?
I leave you with this point for reflection, hoping that this post does not contribute to the mountain of rubbish in which some future historian will be obliged to rummage in an attempt to understand how Humanity managed to reduce itself to such a state.
