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In the 2024 article The New York Times In an article titled “As China's Internet Disappears, 'We Lose Part of Our Collective Memory,'” Li Yuan sees the Internet as an archive that stores much of our recent collective memory. That said, the knowledge shared in China, albeit through filter bubbles and algorithmically curated information, is quite different from the knowledge known to most Google users.
Chinese people are well aware that their internet is “different,” but what's even more disturbing is that large parts of it are disappearing. Yuan sums it up succinctly by quoting blogger He Jiayan: “We once believed that the internet had memory, but we didn't realize that this memory was like that of a goldfish.”
The technology philosopher Bernard Stiegler spends much of his waking hours thinking about the issue of externalized memory and its relationship to digital technology.
For Stiegler, the issue is not simply about the relationship between externalized memory and technology, nor about the impact of tools, including digital tools, on our lives (though these are important, too), nor is he concerned solely with how these technological tools are used and sometimes controlled by powerful individuals and organizations, such as Amazon, Google, or Facebook, or by nation states, such as Russia or China.
For him, our relationship to technology is about something more fundamental: technique. That is, Stiegler sees the invention of tools and technologies not just as an extension of our capabilities, but as a way of imagining and inventing life by means other than biological life.
Technology and the externalization of memory
As the Internet so beautifully illustrates, technological inventions make it possible to externalize personal memories. Long before the advent of the digital, this was done through rituals, tools, music and art. Once externalized, personal memories take on a social dimension and can be transmitted across generations through what we call “culture.”
Externalizing memories is not a problem By itselfHowever, for Stiegler it raises the question of coordination between technical and social environments, since when technical systems change radically, as in the digital case, so-called phases of misalignment arise that require collective processes of meaning-making for their stabilization.
In particular, Stiegler sees this in terms of automation: indeed, automation itself is not the problem: every society, every individual, and even every biological cell deals with a set of automations. In a sense, automation is the basis of life.
The problem lies in the way digital automation short-circuits the intentional functions of the mind. This also applies to the educational environment, which is itself in a phase of maladaptation and hyper-automation due to digitalization, especially the recent introduction of ChatGPT.
Just as society requires collective intervention, so too does the research environment require academic narratives that reject the mindless externalization of our collective knowledge. For even as many welcome “AI” as revolutionary for research practice, Emily Bender and her fellow researchers rightly argue that there is nothing intelligent about AI.
Large-scale language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT rely heavily on machine learning techniques to probabilistically cluster patterns in data, stitching together linguistic chains with little or no reference to any considered meaning, and are believed to exhibit a degree of intelligence.
Consider that the LLM is trained on our externalized memories and knowledge, meaning that instead of generating knowledge, it is reflecting our collective consciousness back to us, or at least an algorithmically altered version of it.
This is not knowledge production. It is a shortcut that bypasses the process of knowledge production in favor of an end product. So when students and researchers turn to ChatGPT to create class assignments or research projects, they become accustomed to an algorithmically orchestrated rendering of knowledge production rather than an authentic experience of a revelatory moment, or “Eureka!”.
The three stages of proletarianization
For Stiegler, this automatization of the deliberative functions of the mind leads to what he calls generalized proletarianization.
Stigler identifies three stages of proletarianization.
The first, in relation to the work of Marx, describes the externalization of workers' knowledge to machines, which, while having some advantages, also leads to the loss of labor knowledge (ExpertiseThis period is typically explained within the framework of the First Industrial Revolution.
The second stage, which does not completely replace the first, occurs with the widespread application of mass production, that is, Taylorism-Fordism. In this case, the externalization of memory is more subtle, since there is no direct relationship between man and machine.
This change takes place rather at the level of desire, specifically at the level of the desire to be a consumer. For Stiegler, consumption entails the loss of life-knowledge (The Strength to Live), meaning that material and psychological security comes through purchasing power, not collective care practices.
The third stage is the one we are in now, which has been generalized by the advent of financialization and digitization of life.
Proletarianism and the Loss of Conceptual Knowledge (Theoretical knowledge) results from the continuous and almost automatic externalization of memories onto devices such as mobile phones.
What is certain is that we have yet to begin to understand the short- and long-term implications of a cognitive infrastructure in which our collective memory and knowledge production are eclipsed by processes of recursive optimization and predictive performance.
Given this, it is not surprising that Stiegler describes the process by which our memories become externalized and automated as trauma or technological shock. Trauma is, of course, a natural part of life, but we must be careful not to pathologize it.
But how can we create thoughtful world-building practices, including those related to research and education in general, when people all over the world are constantly dreaming of the next stage of self-externalization? And who can blame them? With so many complexities to address and so few shared practices of meaning to ease the sense of closure, it's no wonder many choose to “Netflix and chill” in their onesies instead.
Restorative Hermeneutics
For example, diagnosing and not turning away from the uncomfortable feelings and situations generated by our modern digitalized lives is what the theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls restorative hermeneutics.
It is a practice that replaces mimetic, prescient, paranoid interpretations of suspicion and the overdetermined geographical, historical, political, and other relations they underpin with a corrective inquiry that aims at transformation through the creation of collective resources for care and maintenance.
This is not a choice of end product, but a process that calls for us, as a collective, as researchers, and as educators, to dismantle our own paralysis by decolonizing our own algorithmic unconscious, beginning with resisting the homogenization of mass media and our over-reliance on and addiction to technology.
It's also a call to resist the internet blah blah, the noise that obscures what's really happening in our collective memory, which is far worse than the disappearance of parts of the internet in China.
Chantelle Gray is Professor of Philosophy in the School of Humanities and Director of the Institute of Contemporary Ethics at North-West University, South Africa.
