A certain strain of intelligent tech criticism warns that passive acceptance of data determinism kills human creativity and leads to civilization necrosis. But...
this insight is unfortunately highly susceptible to being absorbed into the idea that only our divine-like powers of boundless imagination differentiate us from the bots and therefore are the only things that can save us...
the difficult reality is that our faculties of imagination are not magical or godlike in the sense of infinite or salvific power; in fact it is this reality above all that our bots ram home every instant with accumulating inescapable force...
still less fortunately, the worshippers of the “divine imagination” fail to accept that human imagination can never be “liberated” from human memory and indeed can only be saved from an idolatrous obsession with transformation into pure spirit by the bounds and laws of memory...
but fortunately this is true, our imagination and memory are complementary and harmonious faculties even if one is pulled forward and the other pushed into the background by various media, as digital pulls memory forward and pushes imagination back
understanding this, wise critics of anti-human uses/abuses of technology must recognize our distinctive human memory is both different from and better (for us) than machines’ memory even despite their “godlike” powers, and one of its best roles for us is disciplining imagination
the key to reclaiming the REAL present from the shimmering future that never arrives because it is an illusion: building cultural institutions through the discipline of applying an imagination firmly but generously bounded by human memory and that which our memory most must house
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