I Need to Forget: But What If Machines Won't Let Me?

“To be able to forget means sanity.” --Jack London

Some things I need to forget. I want to forget.

The name and the memory of the bully who terrorized me in the 8^th grade. I’d love to let that go.  The moment my heart got broken by someone I loved when she told me she no longer loved me. That still hurts almost twenty years later. The second a car smashed into the side of a vehicle I was a passenger in; the slow motion memory of glass shattering and then the eerie silence, save for the “tick, tick tick” of the motor now stilled. Just calling that memory forth again makes me shudder. It’s not that I could ever really, really fully forget those painful memories but time and a self- protective psyche has done a pretty good job of that for me. I’m thankful I can forget.

Because some things I need to forget. I want to forget. 

My grocery list for last Tuesday: soup, bread, gummi bears and masking tape.  No reason to retain that clutter. I do not want to remember the sharp insult a friend hurled my way last week, a cold word he quickly regretted. To move on and forgive him, I need to forget.  The name of the man who wrote the theme song for the “Gilligan’s Island” TV show—Sherwood Schwartz, of course!  Save for my weekly trivia match, why hang on to that memory morsel?

To remember. To forget. 

This is what makes us human.  To live and accumulate the memories of life, memories that pile up like so much baggage in the brain.  To live and let go of memories: because they are too hard or too random or too tender or too disposable. I am grateful for memory. Of that there is no doubt. Memory makes me, me. Memory reminds to be thankful to God for all I’ve been blessed to experience. Memories of yesterday give me context to understand today.

And so, I thank God for the memory of my very first kiss with Lisa, in the eighth grade…the memory of the June day I said goodbye to my beloved grandfather, stood by his grave and wept as my niece placed her hand on my back and comforted me…the memory of my very first baptism, thirty years ago, how I clutched with care that tiny little life in my embrace. But so too I thank God I can forget.  Pain. Trauma. Mistakes. Embarrassments. Shame.

Here’s the odd thing about remembering and forgetting in 2020. In the digital age, collectively and individually, we can remember more now than ever before in human existence.  Remembering is now done for us. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook collectively store and remember more than 1,200 petabytes of cultural and personal memory. Text messages and emails and news and videos and photos and books and public records: anything that can be digitized.

How much memory is thus remembered?

Just one petabyte equals 20 million four drawer filing cabinets filled with text or 10 billion photos. Fifty petabytes equals the entire written works of humankind from the beginning of recorded history. So, even if we don’t want to remember, we kind of have no choice.  Machines do it for us.

Forget something? A name? A song? A past action? Pull out the phone and google it or retrieve a long ago photo or look up a decades old news story or dig out of storage an email you wrote twenty years ago.  In a very real way, we can’t forget now, and like all radical shifts in human and technological development, that’s potentially great and cool and that’s really weird and troubling.

It makes me wonder: when machines remember for us, will we eventually forget how to tell stories to each other? Spend less time at family reunions or the local bar or over dinner, sharing memories in our own voices? At church, will we eschew an oral tradition of preaching and teaching, and instead just pass around a hand held tablet? When machines remember for us, is it impossible for us to ever escape our past, to jettison that which we’d rather just not remember, and wish the world would forget too?  When machines remember for us, will we let them decide what the most important memories are in our lives, what memories to hold onto, what memories to erase?  

When machines remember for us, will we be able to exercise that most basic of God-given human rights and humans needs? To sometimes just forget. Here’s a challenge: think on that question but do so without any machine assistance. Instead use your mind, use your thoughts and use your memories.

To remember. To forget.  Who decides?