(Im) Permanence in Digital World

Our forefathers have looked around the world and wondered about the meaning of it all. They have wondered if the nature of this world was permanent. Parmenides argued that everything in existence is permanent and unchangeable. It was the very principle of existence. Something exists because it is permanent. Anything that is subject to change it passes from existence to non-existence on a circular basis. Heraclitus was absolute and very clear about change: “Everything flows,” he says and remarks, “you can never step in the same river twice” since the next time you step in it, it would have changed. A philosopher writes: “The way I see it, permanence and changeability are two aspects of the same thing. Two faces of the same coin. It depends from what angle one looks at the world.”
The philosophy of permanence is a topic for another day. First, I want to discuss a form of permanent expression of ideas: writing.
Writing first developed in Sumeria roughly between 3000BC and 3500BC, as a means of long-distance communication, necessitated by trade. Trade required explicit — and let’s not forget permanent — record of transactions. Verbal records weren’t just reliable. The need for such record was so dire for humanity, scholars now recognize that writing was independently developed in at least five ancient civilisations!
What started as a necessity for trade, we quickly let this form of permanence enter deeply into our hearts and minds. We wrote literature and love poems. We wrote epics and ballads. We wrote letters: a permanent record of thoughts conveyed to another person. Thoughts of love, success and failure. We physically wrote … software code! Isabelle Allende, the author of The House of Spirits famously says, “Write what should not be forgotten”.

Information revolution has changed this status quo. We now have computers that record writing for us. The tiring work of physically sifting through the letters when you want to find one, has been replaced with fancy search-bars.
Don’t get me wrong! I’m glad this happened. I’m not anything like Gil Pender in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. How else would you scale communication? My worries are not that computers have changed the way we write; it is that huge corporations — who have the resources and reach to engineer the very fabric of society — misuse this huge responsibility due to market demands.
It was not so long ago that we laughed at that hopeless romantic who had sent a text message to his lover wishing he could take it back. It used to be such a final thing, sending a text message. We used to be careful in structuring our sentences and thoughts knowing that it could have a huge irreversible impact on relationships. WhatsApp recently flipped this centuries of culture of writing on its head. Suddenly, you could delete what you had sent earlier. To adults, ‘This message was deleted’ has introduced a separate set of social complexities. To young children, who regularly use the app nowadays, the subconscious message from them could be catastrophic. “It’s okay to take back your words;” they say to children, “go on, everyone is doing it!”. It’s no surprise that we are now seeing young workforce simply refusing to own their piece of work.
While India was debating Article 370, Facebook silently made an update to its message. Remember the promise, “Facebook will always be free”? They have now moved on from permanent promises to quick (and easy) ones, acknowledging silently the modern, literal fleeting sentiments of the market.


Unsettling, isn’t it?
For the first time, we now have the technology to make history an unbiased study. History need not be written by the victor anymore. For future generations, it is conversations on WhatsApp and opinions expressed on Facebook that serve as accurate study of history. What is true history, if not the study of events from different perspectives — none right, none wrong? Next time you delete a post on Facebook because it was too embarrassing, remember … you are changing history.
I would like to end this article with a piece of uninvited advice. Think and proof-read. Do not delete your words online for the most part. Own them. If mistakes have been made, acknowledge them. If you HAVE to delete or edit a message, do it responsibly. It will help you build character.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn on 7th November, 2019