A few months ago, my phone fed me a push notification that stopped me in my tracks. I had just uploaded my iPhoto library to iCloud for the first time, a long-overdue move to shore up over a decade of grainy digital memories. But what I hadn't realized was that backing up all those old photos wouldn't just keep them from slipping away; it would give them license to crop up any and everywhere, whether I wanted them to or not. Now, I was walking to the Q train in Brooklyn, face-to-face with a reminder of a moment from years ago and thousands of miles away that I had completely forgotten about. "On this day in 2015": You were somewhere and someone else entirely. How about that?
"Our smartphones pulse with memories now," Lauren Goode points out. Her 2021 essay for WIRED, I Called Off My Wedding. The Internet Will Never Forget, is both a personal and cultural history—of the end of a relationship, and of how our devices came to co-opt our memories. Often, being served a reminder of an earlier time is lovely. It's a joy to recall an outing with an old friend you haven't seen in years, or a summertime trip to the beach in the dead of winter. But coming face-to-face with these memories can also be heart-rending. Years after Goode opted not to walk down the aisle, the internet kept feeding her wedding-related ads and other relics of a chapter of her life she had made every effort to close.
When Goode spoke to technologists, she was told that these systems ought to become more sophisticated over time. "Algorithms should be more refined, so we're not trailed by events we'd rather leave behind or nudged into experiences that we don't really want," she writes. "Timelines should actually consider the passage of time." But it's hard for me to imagine these models ever really becoming smart enough to intuit the full spectrum of emotional responses someone might have to a resurfaced old memory, even if they're trained on our behavior.
All of this raises a few questions. Can you ever really expect an algorithm to anticipate a human response? What's the best use case for technology that churns up reminders of old times? And how do you forget in the age of automated remembering? Hit me with your best theories in the comments below the story. I'm eager to hear what you think.
See you next week!
Eve
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حبيبي ليس يعدله حبيب *** ولا لسواه في قلبي نصيب حبيب غاب عن بصري وسمعي *** ولكن في فؤادي ما يغيب يا حبيب ...
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