Patch #4: Ric Flair, digital memories, Toyin Ojih Odutola, The Peripheral, and the future of loneliness
Thomas Webster, “A Study of the Schoolroom” via Wikimedia Commons
At some point in the last year, I spent an entire weekend morning watching monologues by the legendary wrestler “Nature Boy” Ric Flair on youtube. The thing is, I don’t remember when I did this or any of the associated sensory details. I remember Flair’s words….thousand dollar suit, alligator shoes, a limousine outside waiting to take me to the airport, wooooooo! but I don’t remember myself as a physical being in any part of the experience.
Contrast that with the following distinct memory: I’m six, watching wrestling on TV with the four Peters brothers in suburban Atlanta. The Peters boys are standing, heaping abuse on The Nature Boy. Shut your mouth, Flair! Cheater! That’s what you get! A swampy-smelling Airedale wanders into the scene, thinks better of it, and shuffles back toward the kitchen. We pour RC Cola from two-liter bottles into collectible NFL glasses from McDonald’s. There are Tostitos and Velveeta dip. A go-kart sputters by on the street outside. If the scene lacks the pastoral lyricism of Nabokov’s Vyra schoolroom in Speak, Memory, it possesses similar powers:
A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
The presence of the TV screen does little to diminish my recall. My point in telling the story, however, is less about the memory itself; it’s the sensory flatness of the youtube session in comparison — a common dynamic when it comes to digital memories. I struggle to remember, in the Nabokovian sense, my life on the internet. I know I’ve been doing something: scrolling through feeds, trying to find someone to love (when I was single), reading about esoteric hifi, Zillow-gazing at cabins, playing NBA 2K and Disco Elysium, buying too many records on Discogs, working, reading the news, and generally going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole for hour after hour.
I know that I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time doing these things, and the content of these investigations and distractions are still with me in some form, but the set pieces never really come to life as scenes. What I was wearing? What was on the stereo? What was I eating or drinking? Unlike the memory of watching TV with the Peters brothers in 1983, these digital memories are comparatively devoid of associations. It’s not just the lack of sensory richness; it’s the quality of my attention: the endless clickways dull the dance between perception, action, association, and the many other subtle processes that turn experiences into long-term memories.
Compare that with the analog recollections triggered by the “Memories” widget on my iphone, which functions for me like a daily madeleine. I hold my finger on an image and, like magic, hear my daughters when they were younger. I remember what it was like to be in relation to them at a fixed point in time. Sometimes it poleaxes me with gratitude; other times it fills me with a melancholy awareness of the passage of time. Whatever the emotion, it rushes back, and I remember who I was with, how the sun or cold felt on my skin, what it smelled like, and how it felt, really, to be both human and alive at that very specific moment.
Apple Memory on my phone from 2012
These small sensory details matter. As Nabokov also said, “Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.” Indeed, In 1989, the researchers Arnie Cann and Debra Ross showed how olfactory stimuli can improve recall. Might we say the same for vision, taste, touch, and sound? Last spring, my colleague Daniel and I attended a conference at MIT where Professor Joe Paradiso memorably talked about the lack of sensory layers in the Metaverse. My takeaway: despite the breathless hype of the last few years, we have a long way to go before digital environments get anywhere close to the complexity and nuance of physical ones.
The difference between my analog and digital memories is so stark it makes me wonder about our rising allocations of time in the digital world. What will so much time online do to the future of our memories? Will a decline in rich, sensory, analog recollections catalyze a surge in loneliness? The more I think about it, the more it strikes me that this subject is under-represented in the current discourse about both the impact and future of technology.
A few months ago, I was in San Francisco for work, attending an event at SFMOMA, where I came across an exhibition called “Satellite” by the artist Toyin Ojih Odutola. Here is the description I encountered in the exhibition space:
The year is 2050 and Oluwaseun is an encryptor in Eko—the traditional Yoruba name for today’s Lagos, Nigeria. With the outside world besieged by overpopulation and climate refugee migration, Oluwaseun lives a secluded existence in a compact apartment tiled with reflective screens. She struggles with “self-forgetfulness,” a common affliction often caused by chronic trauma, and subscribes to REMINDR, a memory-retention service that dispatches monthly prompts and exercises. A holographic prompt soon reveals the spirit of Adeseun, and he and Oluwaseun orbit, collide, and ultimately merge, leaving their mark on their home in the form of a new memory.
The paintings in the exhibition show ghostly images of the past on the reflective screens that surround Oluwaseun. While a new memory emerges, one gets the sense that its birth is complicated and rare — something to be cherished. In order to exist, the memory must transcend the impediments of its digital constraints. As a viewer, you wonder not only how many memories the protagonist will have of her time in confinement, but how your own recollections (or lack thereof) might shift in a worst-case future.
It occurs to me that Odutola’s exhibit is one of the first times I’ve encountered a speculative representation of this very specific form of digital amnesia and its connection to trauma and loneliness. Yet, as we march toward this largely unanticipated future, I’m struck by the emerging body of work describing “an epidemic of loneliness” here in the present.
This accelerating epidemic, as Derek Thompson points out, has a direct correlation to the mental health crisis. We can easily draw a line from the chart above to alarming findings in studies like the 2021 Surgeon General Advisory, which pointed, among other things, to a 44% rise between 2009 and 2019 in the number of high school students who have made a suicide plan.
In my mind, all of this coalesces into a doom loop. We are lonely so we seek distraction in digital spaces, which makes us lonelier, which makes us seek more distraction, and so on. Per Francis Bacon: cure the disease, kill the patient.
What kind of future might this lead to (other than one where we cower in apartments surrounded by reflective screens and subscribe to memory-retention services)? I’ve been watching Amazon’s series The Peripheral, based on William Gibson’s 2014 novel of the same name. In the series, we jump from 2032 to 2100, and one of the profound differences of the 2100 world is how lonely it is due to population decline. Tech tries to fill in the blank spaces with holograms of crowds and interactions, which can be dialed up or down with a slick twist of the fingers. But once you know the trick, it ceases to offer comfort. It’s far more immersive than our technologies now, but will technology ever really be sophisticated enough to give us digital experiences we remember with the same depth as analog ones?
Scott Tobias writes about the show in the NYT:
One major theme in “The Peripheral” is how much technology alters the connections that human beings make with one another — connections through time, through virtual experiences and even through a shared consciousness. Burton and his fellow Marine veterans are a “Haptic Recon” unit, fending off attacks from the future though the seamless communication of hardware implants. Flynne and Wilf (Gary Carr), her contact in London, develop feelings for each other, but they cannot share the same physical space.
In the show, even with all of the marvels on display, the mediated spaces still feel insufficient. If I were to jump into such a future, the set pieces of my memories might be better, but I still think they’d lack the sensory context to make the jump to scenes.
It’s the depth and complexity of the connection between humans and the natural world that allows memories to transcend the short-term limits of perception and leap into new dimensions of mystery and meaning. As miraculous as they are, the digital worlds we inhabit will remain copies that lack critical layers of input. It’s our movements through the physical world that truly make a life — allowing us to remember not only the people and places we love and the scars we accumulate, but who we are in relation to what we’ve experienced.
This week’s recommendations:
Reading: “Your Creativity Won’t Save Your Job From AI,” The Atlantic, Derek Thompson
Listening: In reading up on the Odutola exhibit, I found out there is an accompanying playlist on Spotify.