Law in the Internet Society

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DanaDelgerFirstPaper 10 - 18 Jan 2010 - Main.DanaDelger
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Since even before we first began scratching out narrative on cave walls and in leather, man has longed to debiologize memory, to preserve experience in a shape less fickle the physical self. This is a desire born of necessity: Nothing more than the heavy firing of neural artillery, memory is as fragile as the tissue which embodies it, and so the life of man has been a constant search for way of escape from memory's caprice. Today, this escape is not only easy, it is already done: turn on the Facebook and let the ticking seconds of your daily life find permanent rest: memory, immortalized.
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Since even before we first began scratching out narrative on cave walls and in leather, man has longed to debiologize memory, to preserve experience in a shape less fickle than the physical self. This is a desire born of necessity: Nothing more than the heavy firing of neural artillery, memory is as fragile as the tissue which embodies it, and so the life of man has been a constant search for way of escape from memory's caprice. Today, this escape is not only easy, it is already done: turn on the Facebook and let the ticking seconds of your daily life find permanent rest: memory, immortalized.
 

The biological memory, fragile though it is, does not travel alone, unmoored; it has for a constant companion its twin: that is to say, dreams—the pieces of our day made ciphered, unreadable, and spit back into our gaping mouths while we sleep. Awake, the brain traces fire along neural pathways to form memory; in sleep, it reconstructs a narrative from the fragmented and bleating ashes of that loop, which whisper on and on into the night. But if the dream is the fractured reconstruction of memory, and our memories are now machinized, does it not follow that our digital selves too are susceptible of dreaming? Yes, yes, the digital self too dreams, but they are different in kind and more dangerous than those born of the body.


Revision 10r10 - 18 Jan 2010 - 14:46:02 - DanaDelger
Revision 9r9 - 18 Jan 2010 - 00:06:08 - EbenMoglen
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