Digital amnesia

I am writing this on Thursday November 12, but you will probably not read it until Friday November 13. That’s because my ISP host crashed. Two days of digital data — everything since their last backup — is currently in limbo. They are trying to restore things, but it’s not clear that anything I post will make a difference until they finish, which they say will be some time tomorrow.

I find it both fascinating and disturbing that this blog has lost several days of memory, at least for now. Anybody going to this site (until the problem is fixed) who has already read the posts of the last two days will find them mysteriously vanished, as though those posts had never existed. It’s as though we’ve slipped into an alternate reality in which this blog has contracted short term digital amnesia.

I sense an opportunity for a dystopian story somewhere here. Imagine you wake up one morning to discover that everybody else has forgotten the last several days of your life. You have all of these vivid memories of specific events, but to everyone else, it’s as though those events never happened.

Somehow I suspect that this idea has already been used in literature, but I can’t quite figure out where or by whom. Maybe my memory is going… 😉

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