Do you remember Doge? Not the new United States government department currently operating a coup, or even the cryptocurrency. I mean the original meme, the Shiba Inu with the Comic Sans text.

Can you recall what color “The Dress” actually was, that viral image that tore the internet apart? What about Alex from Target, or “on fleek,” or Why You Always Lying? Can you piece together what actually happened during Gamergate, or why everyone was suddenly talking about a dentist who shot a lion? Do you remember why #BringBackOurGirls was trending, or what became of those girls? Without Googling, can you explain what the Arab Spring actually accomplished, or name three concrete outcomes of Occupy Wall Street?

You might feel a flutter of recognition at some of these references—a vague “oh yeah, that was a thing”—but chances are you can’t reconstruct the actual substance, the context, the meaning, or the aftermath of any of it. That’s not your fault. That’s The Great Forgetting at work.

Humanity has unprecedented access to information. Yet, we face a paradoxical and profound crisis: we are forgetting how to remember. According to a devastating 2024 Pew Research study, nearly 40% of all web pages from just a decade ago have completely vanished. Graves marked by 404 errors.

This isn’t about failing to recall specific facts or dates—it’s the systematic unraveling of our capacity to know who we are, where we came from, and why any of it matters.

The crisis manifests in multiple, interconnected ways. Most alarming is the decay of the Internet, the system we’ve entrusted with preserving our collective knowledge.

The Pew study found that a staggering “54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one broken link in their References section,” while “23% of news web pages contain broken links.” Digital rot is the active disintegration of our modern historical record.

The Arab Spring—that moment when humanity glimpsed its own power to transform reality, exists now primarily in disappeared blog posts and dead links. GeoCities, once a vibrant cosmos of human expression, has been reduced to ash. Our governments, supposed guardians of collective memory, are now actively participating in this mass erasure.

The sheer volume of information we now produce paradoxically contributes to our inability to remember. Walter (2024) warns in a recent paper that social media is becoming “less about connecting humans to other people but about consuming content and getting hooked by deliberately targeted dopamine hits in our brains, leading to a multiplication of online addictions and behavioral difficulties.” We have real systemic neurological harm colloquially known as brainrot.

We process more information in a single day than our ancestors might have encountered in a lifetime. Cognitive overflow leads us to what psychologists call “digital amnesia”—our growing tendency to immediately forget information we know we can easily find online.

Ancient ways of knowing are going dark like dying stars. As noted in the Spiceworks community’s analysis of disappearing digital heritage, “87% of video games released before 2010 are endangered (e.g., abandoned or neglected),” representing an unprecedented loss of our current cultural artifacts.

The Sami people of Scandinavia once carried entire maps of migration patterns, weather systems, and survival knowledge in their traditional joik songs. Now their grandchildren navigate by Google Maps, their ancestral wisdom replaced by algorithms that know everything about the land except how to love it.

Our news cycles are a cruel parody of memory. Perpetual present tense that devours itself. The Pew study reveals that “nearly one-in-five tweets are no longer publicly visible on the site just months after being posted,” with 60% of these disappearances due to accounts being made private, suspended, or deleted entirely.

We are living through multiple extinction-level events—climate collapse, democratic decay, the death of truth itself—but we can’t sustain attention long enough to even acknowledge our own apocalypse.

Walter’s research on the “Dead Internet Theory” suggests we’re rapidly approaching a point where the distinction between human-generated and AI-generated content becomes not just blurred but irrelevant.

The meta-horror of our situation is that we’re not just forgetting—we’re forgetting that we’re forgetting. Lost in a perpetual present tense, unable to recognize the extent of our own deterioration. The Pew findings show that “even for pages collected in the 2021 snapshot, about one-in-five were no longer accessible just two years later.” We’re raising children who have never had to remember a phone number, never had to hold a physical photograph.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

The war against forgetting must be fought with the ferocity of those who know that survival itself is at stake. Memory isn’t a quaint cultural artifact—it’s the difference between being human and dust, between living in history and drowning in an endless, meaningless now.

A grandmother’s hands remember the exact pressure needed to knead bread—knowledge more profound than any YouTube tutorial could capture. How an old mechanic diagnoses an engine’s illness by its song, no diagnostic computer can truly replicate. Embodied prophecies of what we could still be if we refuse to surrender to digital amnesia.

We need space for slowness like we need air to breathe. Forest bathing as emergency medicine. Libraries with “slow reading rooms” as bunkers to preserve human consciousness itself. The Internet Archive making a last stand against the forces of corporate-sponsored amnesia.

We need new rituals of remembrance like we need water in a desert. We need to carve our most vital knowledge into stone if necessary, because paper outlasts hard drives and memory outlasts civilizations.

Education must be transformed from an exercise in AI-assisted regurgitation into a radical practice of remembering. Information literacy isn’t just another academic subject—it’s training for survival in an age of manufactured forgetting.

Our fractured attention spans need to be healed like broken bones. Reclaiming the human right to complete thoughts. Meditation isn’t self-care—it’s resistance against the forces trying to reduce us to stimulus-response machines.

Communities are the last bastions of genuine memory. Swedish study circles aren’t social gatherings—they’re memory militias fighting against the atomization of knowledge. Indigenous memory practices aren’t primitive but sophisticated technologies for maintaining human consciousness across centuries. Physical objects and spaces are memory anchors.

We must restore the art of real conversation—not the shallow pinging of messages across devices, but the deep, meandering dialogues. Third places are the temporal sanctuaries where stories can breathe and memories can take root.

We must maintain our capacity to be fully human in an increasingly posthuman world. Every story passed down, every skill taught face-to-face, every memory preserved outside of faulty, fragile digital systems.

We stand at a crossroads between remembering and oblivion.

The choice isn’t just about how we store information—it’s about whether we remain human in any meaningful sense. The future of memory may look different from its past, but if we don’t fight for it now, we won’t even remember enough to mourn what we’ve lost.

Originally posted here.