God Forgives, But the Internet Remembers

And Why the Endless Past of the Internet May Be a Good Thing

The old adage may have had something to do with elephants, but the new one is that the Internet never forgets. I’m frequently glad that I came of age in that nebulous space between being the analog and digital worlds; my first email address was in college, with an address long since lost to the mists of the Internet. I printed off emails and saved them as letters, before I realized that—provided I remember the passwords—that whatever was there was there unalterably, long after I wanted to forget it.

Insofar as the Internet has wrapped itself fairly inextricably around our normal processes of remembering, it opens up an interesting question about how we make judgments on the past: on the Internet, can anything be lost forever? And if so, can anything be recovered?

Or more directly: can that which is cancelled in the ecosystem of the Internet be restored? If the memory of the Internet is forever, is forgiveness, or rehabilitation even possible? Or will the sins and missteps of the past accompany us forever?

In Justin E.H. Smith’s new book The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, he makes a compelling argument for the Internet as deeply natural. Far from being an artificial contrivance, Smith offers a deep philosophical history, which argues for the ways in which many of the features of the Internet—endless knowledge, connectivity, mediation, transmission across distance—are not only utopian dreams that humans have had from time immemorial. They are features of the natural world. It’s an audacious argument, and one which I encourage you to read.

Viewing the Internet as a natural world is an interesting argument, in part because—whether you buy his historical arguments about the precedents of the Internet— the Internet is now inextricable from how we remember things: our digital devices and the Internet they access are now inseparable from how and what we remember. We remember, as a human species, with the Internet’s help, whether through archives, Facebook memories, or pictures which pop up unexpectedly on the phone.

The prospect of our memories being interwoven with the digital world is daunting. But with respect to this question of whether or not a person can be forgiven in a world that never forgets anything, the question of what our digital worlds are doing to us gains more traction.

But all is not lost.

As Michael Sacasas has recently argued, part of the reason that the Internet seems to be the playground of endless fights is because literally nothing on the Internet is stable: everything is always modifiable and up for grabs. We enter into “discussions” with one another about things that have happened, or things that are happening now, but our accounting of what the object is that we’re even talking about is always shifting. As we debate, our words become part of the great curatable archive, shifting the register and expanding our knowledge about the very object we supposedly were just having a normal debate about. The past, far from being stable, is always expanding on the Internet.

Here’s where I’m going with this: if the past on the Internet is always open to revision, this gives a new window on the whole phenomenon of “cancel culture”, namely, that cancelling something on the Internet may actually lead to the cancelled having a hope and a future.