Memory of a species
On heirlooms, the Library of Congress, and the impulse to remember and be remembered for anything
There has been no shortage of notice paid to the astronomical growth in active users on the Bluesky social media platform. After a long and slow period of organic growth, the service has exploded with activity, surging right past services like Threads, which had a much more favorable starting position. Many of the new Bluesky users are adopting it as a substitute for X/Twitter, where erratic leadership at the very top has undermined years of goodwill.
â– In the process of moving, a noteworthy share of users have remarked on the uneasy sense that they are abandoning many years of remarks on the old platform. And while it is, of course, entirely possible to export the archives of one's X/Twitter activity, the process naturally causes some to reflect on whether there is any point to preserving such a record at all.
â– For most of the natural world, life is a struggle for survival. But for human beings, it is something different. We haven't conquered mortality altogether, but tools like vaccines and clean drinking water have smashed the old limits that used to keep many of us from growing old. For human beings, life is predominantly a struggle to be remembered.
â– We can't be sure that dolphins and bonobos aren't telling tales of their ancestors, but it's pretty unlikely. Yet we humans struggle constantly with the matter of memory: We visit gravesites, take DNA tests, watch historical documentaries, subscribe to Ancestry.com, fund archaeological research, and digitize the contents of the Library of Congress. Our nations fight one another, but even those that lose battles and wars -- even to the point of being completely conquered -- still have champions who insist upon being remembered.
â– It might not be obvious, but the same natural urges are behind the celebration of National Native American Heritage Month each year and the compulsion to save one's own social media archives. We may be far from knowing everything about big questions like the meaning of life, but our gift of self-awareness tells us that unless and until we find those bigger answers, the next closest thing is to make some kind of impression on the common memory of the species. Whether that takes the form of having a name chiseled in stone, registering for copyright protection on a literary work, or etching a signature into an heirloom craft, almost all of us are captive to the same instinct.
