Our Culture Is An Edifice Built Of

Over The Last Few Millennia We've Invented A Series Of Technologies - From The Alphabet To The Scroll To The Codex, The Printing Press, Photography, The Computer, The Smartphone - That Have Made It Progressively Easier And Easier For Us To Externalize Our Memories, For Us To Essentially Outsource This Fundamental Human Capacity.

We're All Just A Bundle Of Habits Shaped By Our Memories. And To The Extent That We Control Our Lives, We Do So By Gradually Altering Those Habits, Which Is To Say The Networks Of Our Memory. No Lasting Joke, Or Invention, Or Insight, Or Work Of Art Was Ever Produced By An External Memory. Not Yet, At Least.

Part Of Being Creative Is Not Being Super-duper Focused.

We've Outsourced Our Memories To Digital Devices, And The Result Is That We No Longer Trust Our Memories. We See Every Small Forgotten Thing As Evidence That They're Failing Us.

Our Ability To Find Humor In The World, To Make Connections Between Previously Unconnected Notions, To Create New Ideas, To Share In A Common Culture: All These Essentially Human Acts Depend On Memory.