#Define social amnesia software#

This is no time for uninformed moralistic incompetence. When people forget, they are passively relinquishing their political agency they chose not to acquire knowledge, not to engage in understanding historical events and blame actions unto others, panicking when they are unable to figure out what to do next.

IV Just like the Apple corporation model of software updates and model upgrades in hardware require the user to migrate to the new version or otherwise the system begins to collapse, a new brand of authoritarian politics derives from this logic: a) the people it will be inflicted upon are systemically incapable of acknowledging it is happening and b) the society in which they live offers them easy to reach narratives of dilution not allowing them to recognize an authoritarian ruler in the making when they see it. Karl Marx | On Theories of Surplus Value | The Capital, Vol. Marx, in his surplus-value theory, explains it as “the destruction of exchange value and the preservation of use-value give way to new capital investment and the repetition of the production-devaluation cycle”. What do they remember instead? Is there a necessary act of remembrance underpinned to the human condition? Or are we just upgrading the system? What seems appropriate in capitalist societies is the periodic process that allows the system to perpetuate itself without interference of individuals, the State or history. My interest here is in the decision-making-or lack of it-of a person who chooses not to remember violence and war. Maybe she is choosing not to be concerned, not to care, not to remember Vichy, Thatcher or Reagan. A person living in France, England or the United States ought to be able to see how majoritarian political decisions favouring leaders like Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen are harming the very fabric of human rights and corrupting the societies that fought hard to make them mainstream. This is a trap: just because one has not experienced the curtailment of one’s political liberties that does not mean we cannot expand our understanding of that which is harming society. If we take the analogy one step further, this same person would not likely be equipped to recognize the first signs of authoritarianism in her own political context. But no, she has never seen it in the flesh, she ignores the taste of uncertainty, the tension of a police state and she does not know what it means to not be able to travel freely out of her country. She might have heard in the news that in North Korea Kim Jong Un rules by fear, restricting people’s freedoms and their capacity to dissent from his own ideas – or his father and grandfather’s. Let’s say someone has never experienced authoritarianism in her everyday life. These affirmations are powerful and charge political discourse with timeless challenges. unheard of, never experienced, documented, seen before. I will illustrate my ideas with examples on how people own, know and enact politics and resistance from the arts and the feminist movement. I intend to address some of them with the intention of outlining why resistance and disruption in politics are needed more now than ever. What do we mean when we say ‘this is new’? Do we really believe something has never been done before? Is something new something we do not remember doing? Does not remembering mean we ignore it or that we have chosen to exclude it from our narratives? The implications of statements like these in the contemporary political context are unsettling and worth exploring.

#Define social amnesia software#