Even if you kill me. I have no idea where I was at the turn of the millennium, and now that the Earth is exactly a quarter of a century older, it bothers me. All I know is that I was 23, that I had just graduated, and that this memory loss cannot happen to a 23-year-old today.
He swipes with one finger through WhatsApp, iCloud, Instagram and Facebook photos that conclusively prove where he was. I also have proof of important moments after 2009. I can even trace where I have been from minute to minute of the last eight years. My timeline in Google Maps doesn’t forget anything.
I hardly ever look at it. Still, this email made me nervous: “Timeline is changing and is now created on your device,” Google reported ominously vaguely. “Therefore, you must choose settings for your data before April 6, 2025 to avoid losing your visits and routes.” At first I blindly agreed. One such memory crater, one such private millennium bug is exasperating enough. But now I have doubts.
It seems so beautiful, a memory that never lets you down, and that unmasks false memories. So for years I lived in relative peace with a specific memory of the first day of this millennium. With some friends – graduates and long-term students – we stand at an ATM at Noordeinde in The Hague, theatrically swooning over our first drawn euro notes. So the millennium party was at H.’s home: she rented an apartment above a restaurant. Forget it. That euro only came in 2002, I only recently read somewhere in passing.
The modern one homo phonus would have taken selfies with the new money, just like everyone else has a face mask selfie from 2020. He has externalized his memory. Just as insects have an exoskeleton, homo phonus has an exomemory in SIM cards, hard disks and data centers. The objective facts of his life (‘visits and routes’ covers that stuff surprisingly well) are arranged in a rock-solid chronology.
Every now and then an algorithm throws a random piece of it in your face. ‘Do you remember this day?’, ‘throwback video’, ‘on this day’, ‘revisit the moment’: remembering, previously a capricious process of inner associations, shifts to something external: opening files.
It won’t be long before the algorithm has taken over the role of Marcel Proust la mémoire involontaire called involuntary memory, where the taste of a madeleine can bring back an entire episode from the past.
The power of that mémoire involontaire you notice when you play Hitster, the game of 2024, in which you have to place music fragments in the correct time order. I regularly played it with three generations at the table, and you immediately notice when a song from someone’s youth comes along. Then someone suddenly ‘turns on’, starts to shine, swing, dance, vibe. In Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ (1991), the midlifers at the table are fifteen or sixteen again and they are pogo-ing in a smoky disco. That specific spirit of the times has been activated, the soil layer around that archaeological site glows for a moment, the spirit of the times that has shaped our collective.
Deeper layers of feeling
We tend to think of time as an inexorable linear sequence of events – yes, of ‘visits and routes lost’, as Google so poetically puts it. But from within, that mysterious place to which that involuntary memory is connected, it is very different.
When I recoil at the edge of a deep lake on holiday, I am that boy who freezes at the smell of chlorine during school swimming. If I get a bad review, I am the one who gets his test back with a 3 above it. When I approach an unknown city by train, I am the excited 17-year-old on his first interrail holiday.
You are still there. Your life extends into that past, which is not a handful of random fragments, but a constantly present dimension of who you are. All kinds of memories resonate almost imperceptibly in the background during your daily activities and experiences. In those deeper layers of feeling, an inner order is created that is immune to the chronology of our lives, and that works differently than digital storage.
Remembering is more than recording. It is about the inner process that melts images, feelings and spirit of the times into a whole, and this works best with closed eyes and closed screens. Then the specific images, sounds or smells are given the opportunity to float to the surface, contributing to the overall atmosphere of that moment. That mixture of objective events and subjective experience can hardly be put into words. When 15-year-olds ask you what exactly was so great about that Nirvana time, you don’t get much further than: “You should have been there.”
The current 15-year-old can also be everywhere. Photos, videos, apps: all memories are in his pocket. My online photo archive starts in 2009. I thought this was a private thing – our first child was born that year – but the exomemory started to form around that time: Dropbox (2007), the iCloud (2011), Instagram (2010) , Google Drive (2012). But with such a flood of archived material, can you really ‘be there’ somewhere, recapture the spirit of the times?
Seen zero times
I thought about this when I came across the website of Riley Walz (22), an American tech artist. He has discovered a wormhole to that early stage of our digital evolution. Between 2009 and 2012, the photo app on iPhones had a built-in feature. With one button you could share your videos directly on YouTube, which thousands of users did without thinking. Awareness of privacy did not yet exist. So there are millions of videos floating around with automatically generated file names like IMG_0001, IMG_0002, and so on. You can fish them out of the digital dump with the search function.
It’s time travel and voyeurism in one. A toddler’s party. Cute pets. A garden party where relatives dancing with broomsticks. This is the digital version of finding random family photo albums at the thrift store.
Remembering is best with closed eyes and closed screens
Walz built one website where those videos appear randomly, along with the date and the number of views, which is usually under ten. IMG_0001 the project is called.
I always thought that digital films and photos didn’t yellow. I thought the Internet had robbed our personal images of their patina, as German cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote in 1936. the ‘aura’ mentioned. Works of art, he argued, could now be reproduced thanks to the rise of photography and film, with which something essential is ‘withering away’, namely: ‘the aura of the work of art, that is to say the here and now of originality’.
But here you see a new form of ‘aura’, in digital form. Just like iCloud and social media, technology such as image stabilization was also in its infancy. The number of frames per second was at least half smaller. There was only one camera on the back of your smartphone, and so on. The result: each film is often grainy and always jerky, as if the filmmaker was constantly standing in a storm.
What also contributes to that digital aura: the site states the number of views. Sometimes you come across a video that has been seen zero times before. I’m the only one who sees this video of a child in a swing. Zero views gives such a video the aura of an original. The fewer previous viewers, the more intimate it feels.
The period where IMG_0001 winds around us is too close for nostalgia but far enough to notice that something has changed. But what exactly? It’s in details like this: everyone isn’t hunched over their phone at stations, but there are white cords running between pockets and ears. And it concerns subtle behavior: those filmed do not yet have that Instagram or TikTok reflex that turns them into professional posers or influencers. They are adorable teenagers who play guitar in their rooms. Clumsy dances. Uncomfortable faces on holiday terraces. This material is radically non-viral and unslick.
The camera was still a private instrument. That’s why the images are from IMG_0001 unedited. Without filters, not mounted. We witness the transition between the guilelessness of the analogue era – that of home videos, shown at birthday parties to a circle of snickering visitors with the curtains drawn – and the hyper-self-awareness of permanent performance.
And it is about the broader spirit of the times, of news and political developments. I came across a video of a demonstration of the Occupy demonstration in Washington, January 18, 2012. The cardboard protest signs, the Anonymous masks: this was the world in the aftermath of the banking crisis. This was the time of Breivik’s attempt on Utøya. From the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The Arab Spring. From Obama that one ‘We got him’ said, upon bin Laden’s death.
Permanent performance
Volumes of philosophy have been written about the concept of zeitgeist, all of which refer to eighteenth-century German poets and thinkers (Herder, Heidegger, Goethe), but I will keep my definition here down-to-earth. What atmosphere is for streets and neighborhoods, that is zeitgeist for years and decades.
We are all immersed in it. The spirit of the times consists of everything that has been felt, happened, found, concealed and dreamed. The fashions, the mentality, the devices and their design. The fears, the habits, the music in the cafes. I’ll take you ee-eh-eh-eeee… It is the sum of all the invisible forces that act on us.
The spirit of the times is only noticeable in retrospect. Just like the hands of a clock only appear to have shifted when you haven’t looked for a while, and like children you haven’t seen for a few months have suddenly grown.
2801 files, 80 folders
Every year on December 5, Facebook sends me a reminder of a Google Photo memory I once posted. It is a Sinterklaas celebration from 2011. I was a writer in residence at the NIAS research institute, then still housed in Wassenaar, on a beautiful estate. One of the fellows, a cultural anthropologist, arrives like Sinterklaas on a white horse, accompanied by pitch-black Petes, with gold earrings. Foreign. Especially in academic circles – the main parish of the woke movement – such a thing is now completely unthinkable.
I remember that we had the Black Pete discussion that day, also with the African fellows, but it was only in 2014 that it was introduced Sinterklaas news the soot sweeper. There was a different spirit of the times. Someone suggested working with Blue Petes, now it suddenly occurs to me.
At the end of the semester, everyone received a USB stick with photos: 2,802 files in 80 folders. These are all images that I have barely looked at, and that is not necessary. A few snapshots are enough to recall the atmosphere, with closed eyes.
Let us also remember that forgetting is as important as remembering. It is not without reason that we want to store all kinds of fussy and painful things, without a provocative algorithm that teases you with a throwback video. Take my millennium crater. I graduated at the end of 1999 and ended a long relationship. Of course there is an excellent reason that I put away that turn of the millennium, the first party without her.
Selection, screening and deformation (my first euro banknotes) are essential processes in the mental metabolism. If you transfer that mysterious process from the human psyche to the inanimate software of the tech giants, something more essential than those ‘visits and routes’ is lost.
Comforting
And just look at this. All this talk of remembering makes some faces of former friends emerge from the mist. They wear gold glitter glasses, the holes of which form the middle zeros of the number 2000. Damn, now I know where we were. Not with H., but with R., who had baked oliebollen. Outside, at the Pieterskerkhof in Leiden, the trees were decorated with strings of lights. I don’t remember anything else, but I wasn’t sitting at home moping. I had comforting company. When I close my eyes I taste the excitement, the restlessness of twenty-somethings for whom student life has just ended, and the anxious hope for that new millennium. What was that like? Well, you should have been there.