The death of forgetting: technology is destroying our freedom to start over

The ability to forget is one of the characteristics that defines us as humans: it allows us to survive, learn and move forward. Forgetting can be seen as a mechanism for mental and social health: thanks to it, we can forgive, reinvent ourselves, and leave behind what no longer makes sense. But digital technologies, designed to record and store absolutely everything, are destroying the possibility of forgetting. We live in an age where nothing is erased, where everything is archived, replicated, reindexed, or reconstructed. And that, although it may seem like a triumph of memory, could be the beginning of a nightmare.

The internet was conceived without forgetting. Every photograph, every message, every mistake remains accessible in some way, in a log file, in a database, on a social network, even if we think we have deleted it. Copies, caches, backups, and AI training databases are responsible for immortalizing everything. Current systems not only store what we say or do, but are also capable of reconstructing what we try to delete: an image, a voice, a text, even a digital memory we thought was lost. Human memory is imperfect, selective and changeable. Digital memory, on the other hand, is absolute, infallible and unaffected by the passage of time.