The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang
We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers
Why should you read this? — For entertainment and to imagine the consequences of digital memory through a beautiful narrative.
In his 25-page short story, Ted Chiang imagines a Black Mirror-esque future written in the style of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. To explain this point, Chiang layers his work with two synchronous stories that are thematically connected but set in different places.
The first story is about the relationship between a newspaper editorial critic who is writing about a new technology called Remem, which tracks your life with live footage, not unlike Own Your Unconscious from Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House. Before you can say needle, it will search the haystack of your memory and create a small pop-up in your field of vision displaying the exact memory you’re trying to remember. It’s objectively as it happened and not at all filtered by your perspective or feeling. He uses the technology to reflect on his complicated relationship with his daughter.
The second story is about an Indigenous teenager who learns how to read and write from a European missionary which gives him a minor but consequential role in his village that gives him rich perspective.
Follow on for spoilers.
The questions the teenager has about adopting reading and writing gracefully serve as a vehicle to show how writing and reading are just as much of a “technology” as Remem is. Reading and writing made us cyborgs, digital memory is just a hardware update.
These few quotes explain the ideas:
We don't normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers.
A perfect memory couldn't be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film.
We can't prevent the adoption of digital memory any more than oral cultures could stop the arrival of literacy, so the best I can do is look for something positive in it.
And I think I've found the real benefit of digital memory. The point is not to prove you were right; the point is to admit you were wrong.
The concept of a more truthful and objective way to record and reproduce the memory of a moment is the technology. Although it can’t relate to the true emotional feeling of being in the moment, if the wielder has noble intentions and actions, it will enable her to live more honestly. To know thyself better is the goal.
Throughout the short story, Chiang’s first narrator addresses problems like the death of nostalgia, the divergence of cognition from children who always have this technology from those who installed it later in life, and the societal risk of creating virtual amnesiacs if the tech crashes.
Overall, a review can’t express good prose and a well-crafted narrative. You’ll have to read it yourself and then re-read it for good measure and pleasure. The outcome of this story is a rich perspective on digital memory, but what I dream about is copy-catting Chiang’s exact style and narrative perspective.