How to remember things that will be entirely destroyed
Welcome to the Other Machinery substack! What are these things that will be destroyed? And how do we remember them?
Knowledge is the sand that slips through our fingers while we try to withhold it with our bare hands, or with colorful plastic instruments if we are on the smart side of the internet. What's more, we are on the waterline, and, as we know, waves tend to wash things away.
New, up-to-date, revisited, conflicting information is continuously released and coming to our attention while comprehension goals change on a separate trajectory. Our capability of absorbing new concepts is finite and biologically determined. But perhaps most importantly, things end, bringing related knowledge down with them.
Does this seem bleak? I promise it's not.
We have an innate attitude to extract information from texts, situations, sequences of symbols — but the perishing of such information happens as naturally.
To acknowledge these constraints is not a morbid exercise: it is a relevant cognitive process, a starting point to approach reality and its complexity. A complexity that we can then break down with dedicated rigour, sharp technological devices and the aid of good heuristics.
Gathering and organization of knowledge are time-limited and bounded phenomena that we can watch unfold from the outside while trying to orient them for the best.
Productivity techniques, note-taking systems, resonance calendars, time-tracking gadgets, knowledge management software and to-do apps are part of that colorful plastic equipment mentioned at the beginning. They are the technological devices that we build to aid cognitive work.
We can analyze their usage and cultural associations, their functioning and interaction with our intellective uniqueness to understand if they befit us, beyond the buzzwords and the hype.
There is a point where our happiness for a productivity boost, our sense of mental empowerment and our confidence about what technology can do for the learning person come clashing with reality, and something happens to them. Let's figure out what.