Every time I write an account of some personal episode, it seems more impossible to rely on my memory alone. I need only attempt to describe a city neighborhood or cite a news item from the era in question, and I naturally resort to Google to hone or complete my memories. If it hopes to describe the twists and turns of a mind as accurately as possible, the literature of introspection, whether autobiography or psychological novel, ought now to mention the name Google every sentence or two.
David
Lodge published Small World in 1984. The book, a campus novel, follows a group
of academics as they travel the globe attending conferences. But this “small
world” isn’t merely that of international university circles—without borders,
but strictly for initiates—where scholars debate the merits of structuralism,
deconstruction, and old-fashioned literary history. It’s a world linked by
telephones and traversed by jet planes. Morris Zapp, one of the novel’s main
characters, formulates a theory of sorts that applies beyond scholarship, despite
what he says. “There are,” he claims, “three things which have revolutionized
academic life in the last twenty years, though very few people have woken up to
the fact: jet travel, direct-dialing telephones and the Xerox machine.” In
light of these innovations, material coexistence in a single place is no longer
necessary for collaborative work and information sharing.
These claims might seem to resemble those that sprang up ten or so years later when internet use first became widespread. There are, however, some very significant differences. The world Lodge describes still leaves room for loss, for disappearance, for the difficulty of reunions, for desperate searching. This is especially the case for the character Persse McGarrigle, who amorously pursues a young woman he meets at a conference. He constantly wonders where she is. He no sooner picks up her trail than she is already elsewhere. It does him little good to have all the jet planes he could possibly hope for; his agony is the same as that of the lover in the Song of Songs when she asks each of the daughters of Jerusalem whether they have happened to see her beloved. An increase in the possibilities of locomotion is far different from an increase in information that can usefully guide it.
It’s reasonable to feel that Google and GPS have changed the nature of our experience far more profoundly than the jumbo jet and the photocopier—at least as far as forgetfulness and disorientation are concerned. There is something particularly striking about the fact that a new smartphone can fill the gaps in our memory or knowledge regarding nearly every factual question liable to cross our minds (What time is the next ferry? Who was the French prime minister in 1955?), just as the same smartphone can show us—on a map the scale of which varies astronomically at the touch of a finger—where we are on Earth and what is the name of this dusty path through the open countryside on which we have just set foot. A world in which Persse McGarrigle can type “Angelica Pabst” into Google, or find his way to her on Facebook through likely mutual acquaintances, is no longer a world in which only luck could rescue his amorous quest.
However, we could certainly qualify our appraisal of the advent of the internet as well. There are still people whose traces on Google are infinitesimal or nonexistent, and a good many things remain insufficiently archived. Or we could point out that, in fact, it has been a long time now since the phone book first allowed one to look up a name, and even longer since the sextant and compass considerably reduced human disorientation in uncharted expanses.
Each generation sees the technological advances of the previous era—no matter how near—as excrescences of an ancient world. People like to think the world has truly changed only in their own time. But the feeling of witnessing a spectacular acceleration that rejects outright all past centuries, relegating them to an undifferentiated backwater incommensurable with current experience, is not solely the privilege of children who grew up with the internet and see the gigantic computers conceived after World War II as antiques no less foreign to contemporary life than the powdered wigs of the eighteenth century or the quadrigae of the Circus Maximus. “That the world has never changed so much in a single century (except by destruction) is a fact with which we are all familiar,” Malraux wrote in 1965. “I myself have seen the sparrows swooping down on the horse-drawn buses at the Palais Royal—and the shy and charming Colonel Glenn on his return from the cosmos.” But a person who, born before Malraux, had seen the emergence of cinema and aviation might legitimately have had the same feeling of witnessing a fundamental upheaval in human history.
It would not have been baseless, for that matter, for such a person to tell the younger generations that Neil Armstrong’s exploits were essentially offshoots of Clément Ader’s or the Wright brothers’. And a person who, even a little earlier, had beheld the first daguerreotypes could in turn have claimed that he was the one who had witnessed the veritable revolution from which cinema had merely developed. Against the grain of that enthusiasm which sees the present moment as the most radical, the most historically significant, we would need to slide further and further into the past, the cursor marking the authentic breakthrough, until we found the event that, more humble perhaps in appearance than the subsequent innovations, nevertheless constituted their necessary condition: the invention that truly broke new ground, that truly changed the face of the earth, because it sprang forth unplanned, unawaited, unforeseen.
The theory of exponentially increasing change has the merit of lending credence to these ever more frequent proclamations of revolution. It posits an actual acceleration of technological progress at the root of our—prideful and naïve, but also pertinent—feeling that upheavals in human history have become nearly daily occurrences. While people used to wait centuries before uttering “Never till this day,” we seem to have gradually authorized ourselves to say this every few decades, then every few years, soon perhaps every few months.
The hopes that the futurists draw from this theory are dubious. They seem less a possible consequence of calculations than the expression of a fundamental dream that these calculations appear miraculously to deliver: the promise of witnessing the approach, and perhaps even the achievement, of immortality.
What creates the revolutionary feeling of these successive advances? What makes them seem so incommensurable with their antecedents? It is perhaps the feeling that through them that goal of immortality is taking on clearer and clearer form, much as each step becomes ever more exhilarating for a runner approaching the finish line, even though his pace has not changed.
In his book The Phenomenon of Man, published in 1955, the philosopher and priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin contemplated humanity’s turn inward: “I imagine our noosphere is destined to shut in solitude upon itself—and it is not in a spatial but rather in a mental direction that we shall find our line of escape, without having to leave or even extend beyond Earth.”
Today, futurists speculate that a computer may someday serve as the medium wherein our mental reality will reside—immortal, sheltered from the comings and goings of matter.
Two inclinations, distinct but easily linked, drive the increase in our technical capacity: to travel and to archive—in Lodge’s day, to fly and to Xerox—the possibility of leaving Earth, and the possibility of taking everything along with us.
The nearly simultaneous invention of the airplane and the motion-picture camera bears striking witness to this. It is tempting—but all the more risky, as the timescale then becomes very condensed—to look for other conjunctions: that of Sputnik and the first hard drive, of the first moon steps and the first microprocessor.
But in fact, this parallel development arises more from a state of mind than from any premeditation. Over the past few years, the flow and storage of digital information for domestic use has increased far more rapidly than our capacity for space travel. If there were a reliable correlation, the first USB stick or the first smartphone would surely have coincided at least with a voyage to Mars. But the spirit of the times is not solely to blame. What’s the good of physically leaving Earth when the world is entering deeper and deeper into the dimension of the mind, and when we in turn—to our ruin or salvation—are plunging into this inner, immaterial infinity?
From Fragments of an Infinite Memory: My Life with the Internet, a memoir, published by New York Review Books. Translated from the French by Peter Behrman de Sinéty.
To Infinity and Beyond. By Maël Renouard. Harper’s Magazine , May 2020
One day, as I was daydreaming on the boulevard Beaumarchais, I had the idea—it came and went in a flash, almost in spite of myself—of Googling to find out what I’d been up to and where I’d been two evenings before, at five o’clock, since I couldn’t remember on my own. This must have been in November or December 2008; I remember the intersection near the Cirque d’Hiver where I was standing, about to cross the street, the light of that cold, gray after- noon, and the spark that shot through my mind.
It wasn’t simply a matter of retrieving the information as from some mysterious guardian angel, snitch, or record keeper, the way a citizen of East Germany could have consulted his file at the secret police archives, an odd enough thought. The moment of which I’m speaking offered something else: a vision of the present instant already transformed into its digital image, slowed down, blurred, wobbly, like a video on YouTube.
Images like that were no longer imperfect traces of past moments, miraculously captured. Instead the world had embodied the mode of being of those kinds of images, and I could see it quietly uniting with an infinite stock of videos from which we would later be able to extract the image of every past instant. We can already do this with recorded images, but my daydream was that the distinction between recorded and unrecorded moments had vanished. No technology was required for the world to preserve itself in its entirety. In that instant of disarray, I had fleetingly perceived this transition toward a new mode of being—this becoming-image-memory, so to speak—and web portals had become simply the wells from which we could draw a few of the innumerable images in which the entirety of the world’s past could be retrieved. Technology no longer served to record: it gave access to Being’s own recording of itself.
*
Claude Lévi-Strauss says somewhere that even two or three minutes of film recorded by a camera placed in the streets of Pericles’s Athens would be enough to overturn our entire historiography of antiquity.
According to my dream, a person could, with a little patience, locate in the recesses of YouTube those three minutes of sun, dust, palaver, Logos so thick you could cut it with a knife.
*
“A great video = a glimpse into the past,” someone once noted in the comments to a YouTube excerpt from The Threepenny Opera, probably the film version directed by G.W. Pabst in 1931. This was some years ago, in 2008 or 2009; would it be possible to retrieve the comment today? The excerpt must have been “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer,” a piece I was listening to then—and watching—in every available performance. I remember one of my favorites was a Czech-language version dating back to the 1950s or 1960s.
*
In 1956, Edgar Morin wrote in The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man: “Numerous science fiction stories have as their subject the cinematographic recovery of time, to the point of recapturing an incorruptible fragment of the past. Élie Faure develops an analogous vision when he imagines the inhabitants of a distant planet, living at the time of the crucifixion of Jesus, sending us by missile a film that would make us actual witnesses.”
There is an old daydream that locates the storeroom of the past in distant space. Canto 34 of Orlando Furioso describes the moon as the locus of time regained. All things that have vanished from the Earth are gathered there—lovers’ tears and sighs, time spent idly gambling, unfinished projects, unquenched desires, the glory of past kings and of empires stricken from the map. A rich daydream that has since been revived by science fiction: the touching thing about Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the idea that the aviators who vanish from the Bermuda Triangle have gone elsewhere, under the care of angelic aliens whose barely glimpsed profiles essentially rep- resent a victory over time. As if the loss of those dear to us was never absolute—as if they might be kept somewhere in reserve, waiting for and awaited by us, as if this disappearance was the price to pay for a salvation that makes final reunions always possible.
One day, as I was daydreaming on the boulevard Beaumarchais, I had the idea—it came and went in a flash, almost in spite of myself—of Googling to find out what I’d been up to and where I’d been two evenings before, at five o’clock, since I couldn’t remember on my own. This must have been in November or December 2008; I remember the intersection near the Cirque d’Hiver where I was standing, about to cross the street, the light of that cold, gray after- noon, and the spark that shot through my mind.
It wasn’t simply a matter of retrieving the information as from some mysterious guardian angel, snitch, or record keeper, the way a citizen of East Germany could have consulted his file at the secret police archives, an odd enough thought. The moment of which I’m speaking offered something else: a vision of the present instant already transformed into its digital image, slowed down, blurred, wobbly, like a video on YouTube.
Images like that were no longer imperfect traces of past moments, miraculously captured. Instead the world had embodied the mode of being of those kinds of images, and I could see it quietly uniting with an infinite stock of videos from which we would later be able to extract the image of every past instant. We can already do this with recorded images, but my daydream was that the distinction between recorded and unrecorded moments had vanished. No technology was required for the world to preserve itself in its entirety. In that instant of disarray, I had fleetingly perceived this transition toward a new mode of being—this becoming-image-memory, so to speak—and web portals had become simply the wells from which we could draw a few of the innumerable images in which the entirety of the world’s past could be retrieved. Technology no longer served to record: it gave access to Being’s own recording of itself.
*
Claude Lévi-Strauss says somewhere that even two or three minutes of film recorded by a camera placed in the streets of Pericles’s Athens would be enough to overturn our entire historiography of antiquity.
According to my dream, a person could, with a little patience, locate in the recesses of YouTube those three minutes of sun, dust, palaver, Logos so thick you could cut it with a knife.
*
“A great video = a glimpse into the past,” someone once noted in the comments to a YouTube excerpt from The Threepenny Opera, probably the film version directed by G.W. Pabst in 1931. This was some years ago, in 2008 or 2009; would it be possible to retrieve the comment today? The excerpt must have been “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer,” a piece I was listening to then—and watching—in every available performance. I remember one of my favorites was a Czech-language version dating back to the 1950s or 1960s.
*
In 1956, Edgar Morin wrote in The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man: “Numerous science fiction stories have as their subject the cinematographic recovery of time, to the point of recapturing an incorruptible fragment of the past. Élie Faure develops an analogous vision when he imagines the inhabitants of a distant planet, living at the time of the crucifixion of Jesus, sending us by missile a film that would make us actual witnesses.”
There is an old daydream that locates the storeroom of the past in distant space. Canto 34 of Orlando Furioso describes the moon as the locus of time regained. All things that have vanished from the Earth are gathered there—lovers’ tears and sighs, time spent idly gambling, unfinished projects, unquenched desires, the glory of past kings and of empires stricken from the map. A rich daydream that has since been revived by science fiction: the touching thing about Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the idea that the aviators who vanish from the Bermuda Triangle have gone elsewhere, under the care of angelic aliens whose barely glimpsed profiles essentially rep- resent a victory over time. As if the loss of those dear to us was never absolute—as if they might be kept somewhere in reserve, waiting for and awaited by us, as if this disappearance was the price to pay for a salvation that makes final reunions always possible.
Where is the past? Henri Bergson dismisses this question at the same time he poses it, by saying that the past is, precisely, not stored anywhere but rather persists in itself, entire, in its own mode of being, in a virtual state. The past is “pure memory,” which we cannot access as such; for the work of memory is always, according to Bergson, a reactualization of this virtual past through images (on this point, Gilles Deleuze will attempt to go beyond Bergson, by positing a direct perception of the virtual). In my boulevard Beaumarchais daydream, it seemed to me that the world—in relation to its infinite past—had become capable of doing what each consciousness can do in relation to its subjective life: delve into the past to retrieve images. In this world consciousness, YouTube videos had become the image-memories that reactualize the virtual past which has slipped from our grasp, a virtual past which has ceased to be present, but has not ceased to be.
*
Georges Charpak had an intuition that comes very close to my dream of a self-recording, retrospectively accessible Being when he wondered if it might be possible to retrieve sounds and voices from the past, unintentionally recorded on artifacts whose making involved tracing grooves: like vinyl records before their time. He was thinking of pottery in particular. He walked the halls of the Louvre in search of Greek or Mesopotamian objects that might lend themselves to such a study, though in the end he gave up on it. The chance of success, he figured, was too slim to justify the funds it would require.
*
Candidates for the École Normale Supérieure, khâgneux, were traditionally expected to accumulate an immense amount of knowl-edge. As a diversion, they would invent exam questions that were altogether unfathomable and eccentric:
“Who extinguished what?”
“Théodose extinguished the sacred flame, in AD 391.”
The internet is an infallible intellect, its knowledge no longer a ridiculous extract from the infinite space of past events, and now if you type “Who extinguished what?” into Google, you will find the answer: it appears on the website of the Académie Française, in Marcel Achard’s speech welcoming Thierry Maulnier, where he invokes a passage from Robert Brasillach’s memoirs recounting that Maulnier was famous at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand for being able to reply to baroque questions like that. He could even tell you what happened next.
*
From simple riddles to the divinatory power the Greeks attributed to enigmas is not so large a step. The automatic production of results, even for questions that strictly preclude an answer, yields oblique paths, in the manner of the old oracles.
The ancients sought to read the future in the figures formed by stones or die cast upon the ground. For some people, to throw a few words into Google has become a new form of divination—googlemancy.
*
A., unacquainted with Lenin’s work, one day Googled: “What is to be done?” The answer came up right away: revolution.
*
One evening, P. told me a story from 2007 or 2008, when the craze for Facebook was quickly spreading. As a teenager, he had secretly been in love with M. de L., a girl he met one summer at a sailing club on coast of the Vendée, only to lose sight of her when the vacation was over. She was from Versailles; he was from a large town in the provinces. For a few months, he was haunted by her memory, but by the time he finished lycée and moved to Paris, the torment was long forgotten.
One day, fifteen years after that summer in the Vendée, he found M. among the Facebook “friends” of one of his own friends in Paris, T., whom he had met much later and only after various coincidences and sheer luck had carried him infinitely far from his life as a teenager. He realized that this friend—whom he had also sailed with when they were about twenty-five, before Facebook existed—had to be the boy M. had mentioned going catamaraning with in Corsica earlier in the summer of 1993 when he had met her. T. was from Corsica. The ages matched. P.’s memory could no longer firmly establish whether T. was the name M. had mentioned to him, but he persuaded himself it was. There was no doubting it. In any case, he was careful not to risk proving it false by being too curious. Since his love had entirely faded, P. let things be; he did nothing. He was pleased, though, to experience a new kind of dramatic device that hadn’t yet figured in any plot—a recognition scene unaccounted for in Aristotle’s Poetics. He felt he was at the heart of a story the possibility of which had arisen at the very moment the story began.
The sensation was all the more striking in that he saw himself as a character in a story, and at the same time he had the impression of finding, within his own being, the standpoint of an omniscient narrator playfully interweaving the strands of several lives. One of the charms of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time lies in this sort of connection—revealed on the plane of time regained—between people who at first glance seem to belong to completely divergent walks of life. On the internet, P. found in his own existence an unexpected approximation to Proust’s time regained, that restoration all our lives contain in part, though it always remains notional, since in Proust it only takes place thanks to two unique circumstances: the unrealistic knowledge of the thoughts and destinies of others that his narrator possesses (he is, precisely, both a character and an omniscient narrator), and the peculiar limits of the aristocratic world, whose members, with more or less insincerity, are always exclaiming, “What a small world it is!”—and so it is, because they keep running into their cousins. The expression “it’s a small world” is telling enough, but it is of limited application when it comes to the internet. Just because you can explore a vast world doesn’t mean that it’s small. On the contrary, exploration is what allows this infinity to define and unfurl itself. Leibniz hits the mark here: the more connections a world contains, the more infinite it is.
From Fragments of an Infinite Memory: My Life with the Internet, a memoir, published by New York Review Books. Translated from the French by Peter Behrman de Sinéty.
Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past. By Maël Renouard. LitHub, February 12, 2021.
Fragments Of An Infinite Memory: My Life With The Internet by Maël Renouard—a French writer who, among other things, served as a speechwriter for François Fillon when he was prime minister—was published in France in March 2016, as the online experience was rapidly worsening via algorithmic timelines, unmoderated harassment, and growing alienation. The book is, as the title suggests, written in a series of discursive segments exploring the ins and outs of Renouard’s time on the internet. Now, nearly five years later, it has been translated by Peter Behrman de Sinéty into a very different world, which logs on to a very different internet. The delay in publication situates the book oddly. Not new enough, with the speed at which the internet changes, to feel quite like it represents now and not old enough to seem prescient, as with 1981’s Within The Context Of No Context by George W.S. Trow or 1985’s Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman.
The difficulty in reading this book as a work that is neither new nor old appears early on, when Renouard describes the internet this way:
“[A] space in which to explore everything that crosses our minds—curiosity, worry, fantasy. Hence the ethical questions that were born along with it. Plato condemned the tyrant as someone who has the possibility of enacting his darkest passions—of actually living his dream which should have remained the only theater of those passions, in the secret recesses of sleep. Morality is what stands in opposition to the dream of exposing others absolutely to our passions.”
One imagines the tyrant was supposed to be metaphorical when he wrote this passage. Still, it’s emblematic of what is so good about Renouard’s project. He understands both the unprecedented nature of the internet and that history is nonetheless full of useful and clarifying frameworks for what’s happening. Some of the joy in reading the book is not that Renouard is unique in what he notices, but in seeing the connections he makes and the details he holds onto.
He describes searching for the translation for the German word “fensterpult,” which he encountered in an essay written by Walter Benjamin and translates literally to “window desk.”
“Whether in French or in German, Google Images yielded no depiction of this bizarre piece of furniture, nor anything even close, not a hint that might point me in the right direction. The German word strangely called up photographs of the World Trade Center in flames. Out of curiosity, I clicked on one of them, which carried me to an endless forum bristling with conspiracy theories.”
This appears almost like the killer flashing for a split second in the background of a horror movie, the protagonist unaware of the peril they are truly in. The thin wall between an innocuous query and a bottomless conspiracy pit no longer seems like only an alarming coincidence, but instead an engineering oversight in the structure of all major platforms. The people who built it are unable or unwilling to do much to reverse their errors, if they see them as errors at all.
There are other such occurrences where Renouard details in a fleeting moment the type of phenomenon that has come to define life for many people in this homebound, extremely online time of the pandemic. In one instance he describes the memory-destroying nature of a flood of posts, which often makes it impossible to find or even remember topics of discussion from a week or day prior. In another passage he remarks at how strange it was to see his own image on Skype the first time he used it and “the vague presentiment I had of witnessing, in this splitting of perception, something that would one-day become a permanent and, as it were, commonplace element of existence.”
His sense, not unreasonable at the time, was that this future would be further off and brought on by a Google Glass sort of gadget and not a pandemic forcing people to rely on only somewhat improved versions of these technologies. This is reflective of the way a lot of technological changes appear to happen: faster and worse than predicted.
The feeling the reader is left with, as Renouard’s recollections build on one another, is the deterioration of something that was once useful and fun and engaging into something that was primarily not meant to work for the people using it. Fragments Of An Infinite Memory is experientially driven, which leads Renouard to mostly ignore the mechanisms that have created the obliterative and shallow environment he finds himself navigating, the companies that have profited off making their products less functional and more addicting. A lot has been written about this, how the algorithms that control what one sees on Facebook and YouTube and everywhere else pave an insidious path, and that work is vital. Renouard demonstrates that the documentary work of keeping track of how those tools and platforms were and are used, and what people feel, and what they see is vital, too.
Fragments Of An Infinite Memory traces the decline of the internet through one man’s eyes. By Bradley Babendir. AV Club , February 8, 2021.
In 2016,
the year his newly translated memoir, Fragments of an Infinite Memory, came out
in France, Maël Renouard published a short essay that could have accompanied
the book as an artist’s statement. “If it hopes to describe the twists and
turns of a mind as accurately as possible,” he wrote in the Brooklyn Rail, “the
literature of introspection, whether autobiography or psychological novel,
ought now to mention the name Google every sentence or two.”
Google, here, is a metonym for the internet. In one of his book’s nearly two hundred “fragments”—short reflections about life online—Renouard develops the idea further. The internet, he argues, has had a more profound effect on literature than other world-changing inventions. A three-hundred-page novel set in 1990 could omit phones without difficulty. “But the internet has become so coextensive with all our mental acts, with all our moments—of boredom, idleness, frantic work, philosophical reflection, personal anxiety—that a character in the 2010s who was deprived of its use for one reason or another couldn’t fail to be obsessed by its absence.”
Recent releases have proven him right. When the internet is absent from contemporary novels, its absence is often a major plot point, along with whatever disaster caused the absence in the first place. (That disaster seems the most plausible cause, at least for securely internet-connected authors, is further evidence of Renouard’s point.) In Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind (2020), a mysterious catastrophe cuts off the internet connection of characters vacationing on Long Island. In Tim Maughan’s Infinite Detail (2019), a massive denial-of-service attack shuts down the internet all over the world. In Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), the culprit is a global pandemic that kills most people on earth. Aware that “Google would not last long,” the small handful of survivors desperately get in their last searches before it disappears: “We Googled maslow’s pyramid to see how many of the need levels we could already fulfill. . . . We Googled 2011 fever survivors . . . we Googled 7 stages of grief to track our emotional progress.”
The loss of the internet, in these novels, is a loss of memory, a loss of basic knowledge, a loss of infrastructure. By contrast, the writers most famous for foregrounding the internet’s omnipresence—Sally Rooney, for example, or Tao Lin—tend to portray it most saliently as a means of expressing oneself or conducting personal relationships. Their preferred metonym is not Google but social media, email, text messaging, or all three. It’s easy to see why. The act of searching doesn’t have the kind of built-in social stakes that are so helpful for developing a plot or any sense of emotional weight. If the internet is functioning properly, you can—like someone with their Maslow’s pyramid bases covered—take the basic infrastructure for granted and focus on its higher uses. Absent a pandemic about to obliterate it, the ability to look things up is hard to depict in a way that makes it interesting.
But it can be done. In 2007, Martine Syms published EverythingIveEverWantedtoKnow.com, a giant drop-down menu of everything she had googled since 2004. Selecting any term in the menu takes you back to where you started: the website’s only page, with the menu unexpanded again. The interaction strips to its essence the circular experience of using any addictive platform. In 2019, Vauhini Vara published her own list of search terms, all of them starting with question words, in the Opinion section of the New York Times. Under the headline “My Decade in Google Searches,” there is one paragraph each for who, what, when, where, why, and how searches, so that the personality of each type emerges. “How” is predictably practical (how to get travel deals, how to cut cabbage). “What” is surprisingly open-ended (what is vienna like, what a fetus feels, what makes someone charismatic).
While Syms and Vara use years’ worth of data to draw out patterns seen only with distance, Anelise Chen’s So Many Olympic Exertions (2017) contains a sequence of searches more reflective of real-time experience. Even without the impending disappearance of the internet, she manages to give it stakes. In a passage similar to the one in Severance, the novel’s narrator, Athena, opens her computer and:
“I google “knut polar bear.” I google “baby knut video.” I follow a link “knut keeper dead.” I google “knut keeper dead why?” I google “knut keeper conspiracy.” I am bored. I google “animals talking.” I google “animals talking new.” . . . I google “famous thinkers.” I google “famous thinkers young.” . . . I google “how do writers stay thin.” I google “sedentary life advice.” I google “writing on treadmill.” I google my own name. I google my own name again, with quotation marks. . . . I google something else.”
Rather than use data to abstract the experiences that generated it, Chen immerses us in those experiences. She concatenates searches for readers as Google concatenates them for Athena, compelling us to follow an associative chain that could continue indefinitely and stops only arbitrarily. But as with Syms and Vara, the searches Chen depicts are the outward traces of a mind at work, a pileup of clues to an interior life that remains more or less inscrutable.
Renouard is more interested in the other half of the feedback loop—not what our personal internet histories suggest about ourselves, but what his and others’ experiences can tell us about the internet and its effects. In his opening fragment, he recalls a moment when he was suddenly overtaken by the urge to google what he’d done two days earlier. Taken aback by the as-yet-unrealizable impulse, he begins to reflect on how the internet—and, in particular, the inexorable accumulation of instantly retrievable data—has reconfigured people’s emotional, intellectual, and practical lives. Before the internet, “we might forget who was prime minister in 1952, or who won the World Cup in 1970, but we could assure ourselves that at least there was one thing . . . we’d never forget as entirely as all of the rest, and that was our own life.” Today, with the emergence of “a gigantic auxiliary memory capable of making up for just about every lapse in our recollection of external facts, it is rather our personal memory that suddenly, by this new contrast, seems afflicted with a disquieting imprecision.”
Born in 1979, Renouard got an email address and an introduction to the early search engine AltaVista in 1998. But his story is not like those of the early forum communities, LiveJournalers, or MySpacers. While his pedigree is about as elite as you can get—a degree from the École Normale Supérieure, a job speechwriting for the now former prime minister, several acclaimed works of criticism and fiction—his internet usage is nothing special. He doesn’t seem to have been an early adopter of any platform, or particularly technically inclined. He just watched developments as they came, and took notes.
Fragments of an Infinite Memory divides the resulting “notes,” as Renouard himself sometimes calls them, into eleven very loosely themed chapters. The first circles around the effects of search on personal reminiscence. Sidestepping the neuroscientific perspective that tends to dominate popular accounts of “what the internet is doing to our brains,” Renouard filters his reflections through a literary sensibility. In one fragment, he observes that search has “partly demolished” the Proustian distinction between voluntary memory (an effort to recall things you consciously registered) and involuntary memory (when a trigger, like smell or taste, plunges you into a past experience that would otherwise have been inaccessible). “On the internet, acts of voluntary memory . . . confront us by chance, unexpectedly, with buried swaths of our past existence,” Renouard writes. “Epiphanies of involuntary memory draw the digital wanderer into new searches, where he seeks—voluntarily, now—to get his hands on another dose of the ecstatic recollection that so intensely transported him the first time.”
Subsequent chapters address the ways the internet has also changed its users’ relationship to the material world, death, social mores, language, images, etc. The fragments they contain are diverse in form. Many are stories of Renouard’s past or riffs on literature, history, or philosophy. One comprises six pages of YouTube comments in several languages, many of them attesting to nearly identical feelings of nostalgia that videos of old songs had produced in their viewers. A Freud-inspired series, interspersed throughout the book and presented as numbered examples of the “psychopathology of digital life,” recounts others’ stories, presumably as told to Renouard. B. remembers not taking any pictures on a long trip because “I could find on Google Images as many representations as I liked of the places where I went, with an ease directly proportionate to the beauty of the place.” M. explains that getting access to the internet as they were coming of age saved them from the shame of having to “ask about things that appeared obvious to everyone.”
As these anecdotes suggest, Renouard has hit upon a way to infuse drama into a depiction of the internet as basic infrastructure, a technology underpinning memory, practical knowledge, everyday life. The conflict arises from the impossibility of loss without gain, or gain without loss: the push-pull between what the internet and its devices have added to, and taken away from, people’s experiences of the world. “Who hasn’t gone on the internet looking for past loves and friends not seen for years? Time lost in search of lost time,” Renouard quips. (Proust comes up frequently.) The mass adoption of email means that the @ key, which captivated a young Renouard when he first saw it in the 1980s, loses its magic and mystery. The distinction between documenting and experiencing a moment fades alongside the necessity of “stick[ing] one eye to the camera—closing the other” to take a photograph. And the pervasive assumption that a historical event you can’t find online didn’t happen makes it impossible to suggest, as Jean Baudrillard did in Cool Memories II, 1987–1990, that an imagined disaster might actually have been real.
Renouard is generally sanguine about this give-and-take, and his disinterested approach is a sometimes-refreshing contrast to the dueling strands of boosterism and (needed) criticism that dominate popular writing about technology. One of my favorite fragments is a dialogue between two people identified only by their initials:
“F.: “A writer like Modiano has become impossible, now that we know everything about everyone and nothing is threatened with absolute oblivion.”
H.: “One day, email will be a hundred years old. Then two hundred, three hundred, etc. Philosophy or literature scholars in the year 2500 will unearth forgotten or deleted emails the authors they are working on wrote several centuries earlier. . . . People will say: I found an old Facebook profile from fifty years ago, from two hundred years ago. . . . A writer like Modiano, therefore, hasn’t become impossible. A Modiano of the year 2080 will create plots and atmospheres out of peculiar friend connections, “blanks” in a biography time line, or a few photographs that have been online for decades and in which one often sees—particularly at some grand parties that took place on avenue Marceau in 2025—a single pensive face whose name, mysteriously, has never been tagged.”
This imaginative exercise is beautiful the way a satellite picture of earth is, recontextualizing the problems at hand in a way that makes them both more and less important—part of something big and noble, thus comfortingly insignificant in their particulars.
Such a picture, though, leaves out a lot that is essential to understanding. There are broad and deep currents of online life that you wouldn’t know existed from reading Renouard’s fragments: the stranglehold in which a few corporations hold the web, the mass incentivization of disinformation, the rampant sexism and racism, the incursion of advertising into ever more areas of life, the algorithmic flattening of taste, the abhorrent labor practices, the environmental destruction. Yes, this is only a disjointed memoir; Renouard wasn’t trying to write a comprehensive treatise. But especially in light of how observant he can be, the scope of what he doesn’t notice or address stands out.
Then again, if the internet is “coextensive with all our mental acts,” that is because it’s so coextensive with the whole internet-connected world that any book about it could not fail to leave out almost everything. Writing about the internet is, in this light, no different than writing about life. And who would ask that a person writing about “life” come at their subject from so many angles? My instinct to make such a request of Renouard springs from the same source as his desire to consider the internet—in spite of his own observations—as a thing apart. That source, in many corners of the earth, is rapidly drying up. It’s the lingering memory of what life was like before.
Head in the Cloud. By Megan Marz. The Baffler, February 4, 2021.
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