Can a memorial be a beginning?
It was a moment of change. At the end of 2022, a fulfilling work role had come to a close after five dedicated years. I had a rough idea of what would happen next. I planned to take a brief writing sabbatical, so I opened this newsletter account.
While writing many thousands of words did happen last year, very little of it happened publicly, and none of it through this newsletter. I’m beginning this newsletter now to share the results of last year’s efforts, which means announcing a book soon, as well as shorter texts included in larger publications.
More broadly, this newsletter will explore how cultural narratives of technology shape what worlds we can build. You can expect a post when I publish new writing on this theme, plus occasional thoughts on topics like memory, technology, and sometimes, mountains.
Though this newsletter won’t regularly include personal reflections, I did want it to begin with a brief look backward.
The pandemic wove into our everyday lives enough to almost disappear. We can still see its marks in the lives of friends, family, and some strangers as it continues. We don’t memorialize it very often, because everyday brings something new to memorialize. Personally, 2020 brought grief from the loss of my mother, increased volatility in my broader work environment, and of course, the start of the pandemic.
I’m still not sure how to write publicly about these things, though I think I would like to know how to in the future.
My experiences in 2020 deeply shaped the following years. Rather than feeling at ease with my decision to depart for a brief writing sabbatical in 2023, I felt greater uncertainty. I tried to solve for it with a basic formula: hike, write, and repeat. I hiked the front range of the Rocky Mountains and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. In the beginning of the year, I often hiked alone. I hiked part of the northeastern Appalachian Trail, this time with someone I love. Whenever I could, I applied a mix of thin air, elevation, and sweat to my uncertainty. I wrote a chaotic 80,000 word science-fiction novel. I wrote about any and every thing.
Luckily, then, an opportunity arose to focus my writing through dialogue with a group of thinkers I admire. I participated as a Core Researcher in the Summer of Protocols program led by Venkatesh Rao.1 Sparked in part by Alfred North Whitehead stating that “civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them,” the research program hypothesized that the realm of protocols, which underpin everything from internet connectivity to the etiquette of a handshake, might be one way to collectively study the changes Whitehead describes.
Each researcher had their own focus related to protocols. I researched the topic of memory, which included both the role memory plays in protocols and the role protocols play in memory. I intended to look specifically at how our understanding of memory changes in relation to emerging technologies, but I quickly realized that I had to look backward, as in hundreds of years backward, before I could begin to write about how it might change in the future.
The upcoming publication of my essay written during the program won’t mark the end or the beginning of my writing on memory. I became interested in the topic through my work in software, having grown particularly fascinated by how we so easily equate data and memory. The Oxford Dictionary defines memory as, “The psychological function of preserving information, involving the processes of encoding, storage, and retrieval.” While the qualifier “psychological” defends its human qualities, in this definition, the functions of memory could as easily describe how we handle data stored on hard drives.
But, I wondered, how does data differ from a public memorial holiday, an early memory of a walk through the forest, or the more personal memory of a lost loved one? Where do these different forms of memory reside? Does memory require agents, or does it somehow live between them?
To explore these questions, I first gave a talk on the topic of memory at Trust in Berlin, Germany for their LORECORE series of events. This led to the last essay I finished before the end of 2022, which was included in the recently published Catastrophe Time!, a book on financial worlding edited by Gary Zhexi Zhang and published by Strange Attractor Press.
In this essay “Mediums of Memory,” I wrote about how using software might be a richer contemporary metaphor than processing data for our understanding of memory:
The possibility of memory making through software introduces a superficially appealing analogy. Memory recall, while dependent on one or more subjects, can simulate experiences not entirely determined by immediate spatial or temporal limitations. [...] In its ability to be run, recalled, and actively transformed by a participant, the practice of software begins closely resembling a practice of memory, with software looking like the closest medium to memory itself we have produced. However, the idea that memories can be separate from their physical instantiation in the world with a universally identical experience falters.
Not quite satisfied with this metaphor either, however, my interest in the relationship of memory to its mediums continued, and I wanted to learn more about the origins of the memory-as-data metaphor. This then led me to research older historical metaphors, discovering how our understanding of memory often mirrors the technology of our time. In my next post, I’ll share the publication of my essay “Artificial Memory and Orienting Infinity” written during the Summer of Protocols program, which represents the next stage of that research. Until then, you can listen to the related online talk for the Summer of Protocols Town Hall.
So my newsletter begins, only one year after its intended start time. That is, if this look backward for a mostly occluded memorial can be a beginning.
Thank you for reading. Currently, I’m open for writing commissions, and professionally, I’m exploring where to apply my interests next. Write to contact@keikreutler.net to get in touch about working together.
The Summer of Protocols program is accepting applications now for its second iteration.